SLOW

Dolce far niente

On this New Year’s Day, we have a pigeon nesting in our roof. She has two small eggs. I’ve been talking to her every day, gently reassuring her that she has a safe place for now. We moved our braai which was beneath her, so that the smoke would not affect her.

And I’ve been watching her. We could learn a lot from that pigeon.

She is doing one thing well, focusing on her eggs. She’s not multi-tasking. What’s so great about multi-tasking anyway?

It seems that most of the time, everyone around you is so damn busy. Life for us used to be fast. Remember my post a while back, after the ‘urgent text’? We’ve lived and worked in many urban jungles. They were places where people were busy chasing the next dime, or promotion; caught up with appearances, constantly stressed. It was the rat race; fast paced, about face. We chose to walk away.

It’s funny thinking about time, when the whole world has just celebrated the passing of one date and the beginning of another.

As we begin 2019 we find ourselves in new territory. We don’t have the year planned out. For the the first time in years, we don’t have ‘tickets in hand’. Do you?

We’re going nowhere slowly. There’s no ‘to do’ lists yet.

And that’s quite liberating.

Have you watched the film Eat, Pray, Love?  It’s a traveller’s tale set in parts of Italy, India and Bali.  We watched it again when we knew that we were moving to Indonesia. Sure, it’s a little bit ‘saccharin’ in places. But it has one great scene, where some Italians teach Julia Roberts’ character the phrase, “Dolce far niente” – The art of doing nothing.

We’re not encouraged to do nothing. At times it feels like everyone is telling you to ‘do more’ and without doubt the companies are encouraging us to ‘buy more’.

Go, go, go.

The more we do, the more we need, the more we consume. The harder we work, the harder we need to play. It’s lunacy.

No one seems to talk about doing less.

For so long, time for us was punctuated by looking ahead to ‘the next trip’. But maybe there’s no pressing reason to go anywhere. Let’s enjoy now. Here.

When we lived in Zambia, some things happened super slowly. Life in our bush town was basic on many levels. It was too far removed from what we had grown up with. By contrast, life in U.K was not for us either. Too fast, too frenetic, too ‘productive’. We used to talk about a finding a middle ground, a place where we could take it slower.

We found our place.

I’ve talked about ‘Mother City time’ before. Cape Town does slow. And we have perfected an extreme relaxation sport, which we like to call ‘kopje watching’.

How has your year started? Will you be doing more or doing less this year?