Misunderstanding the slow life and failing to live

Misunderstanding the slow life and failing to live by Ratika Deshpande.

I wouldn’t like it if anyone, no matter how much I loved them, told me that I must change everything about how I live because they have figured out a philosophy of life that works for them and it upsets them to see that the rest of the world isn’t living similarly. Why then should I expect to have any control over what people value and how they choose (or are compelled by their position in society) to live?

The most I can do, as a writer, as a blogger, as a friend and daughter and loved one and citizen, is to share what I know and what I’ve learned. To prioritize conversation over persuasion, sharing over controlling.

As Oliver Burkeman writes:

I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn’t quite the real thing, not just yet – that soon enough, we’ll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but that till then we’re living what the great Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz called the “provisional life.” (“There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that… [but] there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.”)

And we don’t have to take on any lifestyle completely. We’re not categories to be sorted or items to be placed into appropriate shelves.

How can I ever choose one way of living, and why did I tell myself that I had to choose? Who am I accountable to, when I write about slow living yet do many things that wouldn’t be considered slow? Who’s keeping score, planning punishments for me for not sticking to a particular lifestyle? I don’t want to worry about that which doesn’t exist.