The balancing act of busyness

I am currently snuggled on the couch. My husband is beside me, watching football. My cat is curled up in a tiny ball by my lap. Outside, it is windy and rainy, the first real force of nature that will rip leaves from trees and push us ever further into stick season. It is cold—finally, finally, the weather has caught up to the season and blessed us with crisp, bright, chilly air. 

My psyche is responding, too—all I want to do is bake, and make soup, and crochet, and write. I don’t want expectations or responsibilities beyond warming my house for winter.

I am caught, very much, in a transitional period of life. The life I would like to be living would allow me to match my output to the seasons, to slow down in the fall and turn inward, to focus on creating and embrace the quiet and the dark.

But that’s not always what I’ve wanted. There was a time where I, like so many others in the nine to five hustle, put so much value on being busy. It was a badge of honour, a marker of how Important and Significant my work was. It’s a trap I still fall into, not infrequently—when someone asks me how work is, I invariably respond with something along the lines of, “Oh, insane as always.”

But being busy doesn’t give me the sense of satisfaction that it used to. In my mid-twenties, being busy at work carried the connotation that you had your shit together—a “real” job (a bullshit designation if there ever was one) and all the benefits that came with it. 

It seems important to me to note here that I am very fortunate in my job: I’ve worked in tech for most of my career, and have been able to hold on through all the layoffs and upheavals that come with that industry (*knock on wood*). My job, compared to so, so many others, is pretty cushy. My work, and being busy, has brought me a lot of good things, and I don’t want to take that for granted (especially in an economy like this). 

But I’ve grown since I first started my career, and when I got cancer, my priorities became very clear, very quickly. Busy was no longer something I would strive for.

I’m still on the couch, watching the sky grow darker as night rolls in. While I wish I could stay home all week—maybe putting the garden to bed for the winter, reviving my sourdough starter, setting out a writing schedule—the reality is that tomorrow I will be headed to Toronto for a week-long work conference. From there, my husband and I will head overseas for a friend’s wedding (another thing I’m really grateful to be able to do, despite it all). It’ll be two weeks before I’m home again, in my cozy candle-lit living room.

This is the tension that I live with, in this transitional time: balancing periods of busyness with my ever-more-insistent need for quiet. That’s part of what I’m hoping to navigate out loud in this newsletter—how do we realistically build slowness into otherwise hectic lives? As much as many of us want to run away to the countryside and start a homestead and bake bread all day, it’s just not feasible for us. So how do we claim slowness in the pockets of time currently afforded to us?

It’s a question I will actually have a pretty unique opportunity to explore soon. When we get back from our travels, I’ll be off work for three more weeks. I hope to spend that time exploring what slowness looks like to me, how my ideal day is structured outside of work, and how I can incorporate learnings from those few weeks into my full-time job when I go back.

It’s a process. I hope you’ll join me.