I find myself craving simplicity. For a year that’s been boisterous with heat, my body wants quiet coolness. Much of my energy has been extended outward this year—toward traveling, teaching, new romances, social media, friendships—and I’ve been wanting to turn inward. December is usually spent in a frenzy of trying to wrap up the year. But all I want is to slow the fuck down.
For about ten years, it’s been a goal of mine to harmonize my body with the seasons; to lie fallow in winter, gently awaken in the spring, heavily flaunt myself in the summer, and begin to turn inward in the fall. I typically do pretty well with spring and summer but fall and winter almost always evade me. I have a lot of trouble with slowing down or turning inward in general, but especially during this time of year when we are encouraged to move faster than we’d like to. It’s interesting to me that the busiest most hectic time of the year happens to fall during a time when everything else is dying and slowing down, when the sun is setting earlier and earlier, when the temperatures are decreasing and inviting us to hunker down and stay indoors, and we very much are not.1
I wonder what the bears and squirrels and deciduous trees think of how we, their distant kin, feel about us forgoing our internal animal instincts to hibernate as they do. I wonder if they worry about us. I wonder if they watch us multitask and push our pace and have considered organizing an intervention for us. Maybe they already have organized the intervention, many times, but we’re moving too fast to pay attention. In a lot of ways, I feel like more and more of us are recognizing that the pace with which we move and do and think—either on our own accord or because we need to follow the tempo that capitalism sets for us—isn’t sustainable to us, nor is it desirable. But somehow we (I) find ourselves doing it anyway.
That fast-pace is seductive. It shouts encouragement to go faster because it’s more efficient, more self-caring, because time is precious, all we have is time, so it would behoove us to be swifter, to cram our minds and bodies and days with as much as we can so that we can make the most of the fleeting moments we have to live. Speed tells us that the only way to really and truly live is by doing (and doing the most). Slowness tells us, whispers suggestions to us, that maybe we could feel our most alive by being which requires an inner listening that we can only do if we have moments to pause and feel ourselves.
Whenever there’s a lot going on in my life or I’m feeling overwhelmed by how much I am holding, I tend to wait for things to die down on its own. But an epiphany I had recently (and I have this one over and over) is that maybe instead of waiting for my load to lighten, I could lighten my own load. Instead of waiting for slowness and peace to find me, I could create it myself.2 That’s currently what I’m attempting to do—to make my own peace, to carve out time for slowness, to scrape things off of my plate.
3I’m saying no to a lot of things. I’m checking in with my capacity before I do anything. I am paying attention to my tiredness, to my desire to be by myself. I’m granting my own wishes. For once in my life, I don’t want to finish out the year strong. I want the year to finish itself while I stay close to myself, in leisure.
When it comes to this month’s playlist, I picked songs that are a reflection of what I notice happening inside of me when I slow down. There are songs on there from River Tiber, Lali Puna, Helado Negro, Kloudink, and Aaliyah. If you’re a paid subscriber (thank you so much for being here!) you’ll find the playlist below. If you’ve joined Big Time Sensuality at the free tier and want to enjoy December’s playlist and other sharings soon to come, become a paid subscriber to support the labor of love I do here.
Wishing you a slow pace and deep inner listening to the nudgings of your animal body as I aim to do the same.