I love this article from The New York Times so much. “The ‘Busy’ Trap” by Tim Kreider. Everything this.
.. Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life…
..What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day…
I have been loving ‘slow parenting’ ideas for about the same length of time that I have been intensively parenting while working frantically, so it is a stupidly slow transition to ‘slowing down’ in life, apparently.
GREAT article. Although my wife says it’s a fine line between going slow and just being lazy, I am ALL ABOUT slowing life down.
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