Slow-down, low-down summertime

Pico Iyer, a well-respected travel writer noted that “The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context.”

Translation for this week: I can’t be a slave to the needle and thread all the time, so no new projects to show, nothing finished, a few things eyeballed but no energy to tackle them. Ever have times like this?

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” (He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone, but then he wasn’t a quilter.)

Ever go to your social media to check something and then put your head up one hour later? The feeds, the algorithm are designed that way. When first I taught about the internet, just as it was beginning to take its toll on the students, an article I read described them as “digital natives,” meaning, they had to choose to leave the internet, whereas, I — not a digital native– had to choose to engage with the internet. But currently, that doesn’t really matter.

Now it engages me. It brings me my friends. It wastes my time. It brings me joy and connection. It wastes my time. I find quilty fun. All of the above.

 James Clear makes the point that even though many things are good to do, if they are not your top priorities, they will distract you from what’s most important, and from what should be given your best and undivided attention.

He notes that “Every behavior has a cost. Even neutral behaviors aren’t really neutral. They take up time, energy, and space that could be put toward better behaviors or more important tasks.”

Or, as I like to say, saying yes to some things means saying no to others. You think I would have figured this all out by now.

“The world is this way, we wish the world were that way, and our experience of the world—how we see it, remember it, and imagine it—is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion. We can’t spare either. If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to find our slippers.”
–from the book Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert

Summer is here!