Slowed Down

How I rid myself of busyness

Last Friday night, I slept so terribly. Baby girl still sleeps in her bassinet, pushed up beside my side of the bed, and she tossed and turned for hours. After a while, I gave up, pulling my kindle out from under my pillow and reading until our room slowly filled with blue sunlight. At one point, I pulled Kit into bed with us, her little body nestled in the crook of my arm, her head turned towards Price’s. Annie joined us, curled up at our feet, a tiny little red ball of warm fluff. Price had an early tee time that morning, and I had the promise of a nap once he got home, and a pot of hot coffee, not just a Keurig cup, in the meantime.

I laid as still as I could, thankful for the silence of a kindle, willing them to sleep a little longer, for the short time we had left before Saturday stirred awake to swell, to slow.

This week, a week of days filled with nothing special except for temperatures below one hundred, a few scattered rainstorms, and a Bachelorette finale I was not expecting, I kept thinking about Saturday morning. How I think our lives were intended to be filled with tiny little moments just like that one, stacked one after another until a full and slow life has been lived.

All day today, I’ve gone back and forth on what to write about this week. I usually find a few spare moments while Kit plays on her quilt to start my stories, but today my time slipped away from me until I somehow was already in her nursery, a warm bottle in one hand, and my phone in the other, typing strings of thought with my left thumb as Kit fell asleep. I had put a Q&A on my Instagram this morning, hoping to gauge what you sweet people like to read, and an overwhelming number said something to do with living slowly, with my days, my nights, how to enjoy every moment.

And given I started this week with that Saturday morning, a bed full of the people I love most, the sun slowly brightening their sleeping faces, a cozy crime novel in my hand, just so, so lovely…I thought I’d start there.

Because I don’t think I’ve always been one able to slow down, or rather, recognize that I prefer things slowed down. I actually remember the very moment I decided to give up on busyness, the moment everything really changed in my life and I began my metamorphosis into adult Addy.

When I was in high school, I wished for more. I wished for leadership, for experience, for good grades and friends and law school or a publishing house or a newsroom, for heels on the subway, a closet full of blazers. In college, I ran after those feelings of praise, of importance, of accomplishment, of worth. In hindsight, I can get embarrassed thinking about what a little busy body I was, how I had my hand in every single pot on that tiny campus. But in the same breath, I’m proud of her…proud of how hard I worked, how scrappy I was in getting things done that mattered to me, in the people I knew and the things I wrote and the nights I studied, the effort I gave in honor of sixteen year old Addy.

But the summer before I graduated, I could feel myself sink into a deep, steady sadness and fear. There were so many tiny little things, as there always is, but what it truly boiled down to was that I just didn’t want to grow up. My brother was moving to college, and I didn’t want him to. I didn’t want to think about my parents returning to an empty house, or me moving somewhere else that next May. I went with some friends to see the last Toy Story movie, crying in the dark of the theater over why Woody felt the need to let his friends go. And on the way home, in the familiar creaky silver Tacoma truck he drove, I told him how I couldn’t stop seeing life in the third person. I felt as if I was watching myself from above, mourning moments before they were gone.

And really, that feeling has never left.

Then the pandemic ripped through everything, abruptly ending an already heartbreaking end to childhood, and sending us home from college early. It was a reason to be so easily mad at everything around me, and that was so incredibly miserable. Everything and everyone felt so angry, everything unfair, everything more and more difficult than it should’ve been, would’ve been.

I got a job at a magazine in May, an apartment at the beginning of June, so I commuted an hour every morning for a few weeks. I felt overwhelmed with anxiety, more than I had ever felt before. And so on those drives, a chalky protein shake melting in my cupholder and a brown lunch sack in my passenger seat, I would pray. Spoken prayers as I weaved my way through the interstate to the tiny old house downtown filled with writers, just as hopeful as I was.

I hated that job, but those mornings changed how my mind worked. I prayed thanksgiving over my parents, over our health, my then boyfriend Price and over his desire to move near me. I asked God for jobs, for continued love for writing, for my friends and to not lose them. I often would show up for work with swollen eyes…but I worked in the downstairs office lit by tiny windows and a lamp or two, so nobody noticed.

And then one day, after my move to my first apartment, I was at a stoplight after work, proud of my lack of need for Google maps, when I thought about Kaitlyn Bristow’s podcast. And for whatever reason, something clicked in my mind: I can listen to Bachelor podcasts.

I could stop at Trader Joe’s just to buy that bar of French soap. I could make that salad Grayson’s mom made for us in college. I could watch Army Wives on DVD and fall asleep on the couch. I could call my mom at lunch and before bed. I could vacuum every night, take a bath and then a shower, use Diva detergent for all my laundry, not just my bedding. How powerful a realization this all was for a girl just starting her twenties…that I can love all these tiny little mundane details that mean something to me, just because I wanted to.

(I never listened to that podcast, by the way. It was just the idea of it, I think. I do, however, wish someone would have told me about the Toast that year.)

It’s been four and a half years since then. My days look different than they did working in the magazine house. My writing looks different…more run-on sentences, more truth. I look different…more stretch marks, healthier hair, less blazers. My family looks different…more babies.

I’ve realized I need so little, really.

I’ve filled my days with things that make me feel just as profound as I did that day at the stoplight on the way home. I text Price all day, every day, telling him I miss him just like when we were merely boyfriend-girlfriend, dates every Friday night. I make my coffee every morning (Starbucks Pike Place medium roast) just for my tiny cottage to be filled with the smell, to carry my mugs around all day, reheating and cooling and reheating again. I love saving my trash television shows for Kit’s naptime, which she still does on my chest because she will only be a baby for a heartbreakingly short amount of time and why put her down for even a second? I invest in Lake pajamas and wear them all morning long, washing them over and over again so I can wear them clean and soft the very next night. At night, we sit on the porch and I light the citronella candle in the amber vase for the few minutes Kit lasts outside, anxious for her bath. I do it because it flickers on the siding of the house, a warm little light, something pretty even just for a second.

Every morning, I try to write my prayers, my thoughts, my thanksgivings, the tiny, silly details of my days so that one day I will read these books back and remember what Price used to say during Kit’s bath times or when my brother came over after work or the day our nephew was born. Big or small, every single moment matters so, so very much. Or, at least, they should.

These little routines are slowly and carefully curated by all the tiny, sweet things I love most from my days. Small things I’ve noticed make me slow down to see again, to feel the beauty of them, the weight of something I love.

The smell of coffee, writing the date at the top of my journal, how Kit’s blanket looks folded over her bassinet every morning, Annie’s love for sitting on the porch, pajamas and old sweaters as robes.

If I had to write it all down, I would never stop.