January 10, 2026 • 33 mins
This is a time of year that seems to move at lightning speed. it can feel like, if we don’t also move at lightning speed, we’ll fall behind and miss something truly important. What if moving fast isn’t the flex you’ve been told it is?
It might seem like FAST is the way to get more out of life. Think of all the magic we can experience and things we can accomplish if we move at the fastest possible pace!
But what if we’re wrong about that?
In this weeks episode I want to give you permission to move much more slowly than is culturally normal this time of year, and maybe even more slowly than you’re used to moving. Fast might be “normal” for you but take a minute and ask if it feels gentle or even good in your system.
What if you could move more slowly and actually get MORE (rather than less) out of your life?
Today, I suggest exactly that. It’s a little benediction for you as you move through the busiest time of year.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host. I want to cover a topic that I
think is really important to this time of year. In particular,
this is a topic that applies all the time to
your creativity, your sense of you know, making something out
(00:44):
of nothing in your life and in the world. But
it's also a topic that is especially applicable this time
of year, in December, which can feel like one of
the most rushed and hurried times of year, and then
also January, which has such a specific kind of and
feel to it. This has been, you know, driven into
our brains. We've been indoctrinated with the kind of New Year,
(01:06):
New Yew mentality, and January, as much as we try
to unravel and unpack those beliefs, still has that kind
of essence to it. And so I want to talk
about how important it is to allow ourselves give ourselves
the permission to go really, really slow this time of year,
all times of year, but this time of year in particular. First,
(01:30):
I want to say that if you want to understand
the value of going slow, all you have to do
is look to nature. Every single thing that grows in
nature grows slow. And I think about this every time
that I see stuff out in the world, or read
things or see content that's from kind of like a
self help creator that talks about, you know, quantum leaping,
(01:53):
or that you can manifest something kind of like zero
to sixty out of nowhere. I'm not saying that those
things aren't posps, that miracles aren't possible. I do believe
that miracles take place, and I believe in a world
that has miraculous possibilities. And also, when you look at nature,
you see that every single thing in nature takes time
to grow. Every single thing in nature moves slowly, and
(02:16):
nothing in nature apologizes for moving slowly. An oak tree
does not go from seed to tree overnight. It goes
from seed to tree over the course of tens or
hundreds of years. And a garden grows the same way,
and the blades of grass grow the same way. And
you know what, every time when winter comes, we go
through a period of time where things in nature even
(02:36):
slow down even further. So this idea that we have
that we can move at a breakneck pace without ever stopping,
that we can just constantly race our way through our
life and never slow down, is arrogant, I think at best,
and really really damaging to ourselves and to our communities
at worst. So the idea of slowing down, as countercultural
(02:59):
as it can be, is such an important part of
being an artist, of sitting in the driver's seat of
our own life, of writing our own story, of getting
to decide the pace at which we want to move.
In fact, one of the things that I have caught
myself saying a lot in the past couple of months
as I've been telling people about this space that we're
building next door my mother in law's house, and then
(03:21):
there's an addition on the house where we're going to
do a homeschool kind of co op for our kids,
And people have asked me, like, oh, what inspired you
to do homeschooling? And it's funny because I grew up
in an environment where there was a lot of homeschooling
happening around me, and because of the environment that I
grew up in, a lot of people who were choosing
to homeschool in that time in the nineties, I guess
(03:41):
it would have been I was born in eighty three,
so in the nineties when people were choosing to homeschool
in my environment, at least in my circles, most people
were choosing to do that out of a desire to
have more control over the curriculum that their kids were
being exposed to. There were conversations around like sex ed,
I want my kids learning about sex at school. Evolution
(04:02):
I remember being a big one in science class. Do
I want my kids learning, you know that the world
started with a big bang? Or do I want them
learning the Judeo Christian kind of origin stories of the world.
So those were the conversations that most people were having
back then. And what's funny is like, I don't feel
any of that around homeschool and my kids now, don't.
I want my kids to be exposed to a lot
(04:24):
of different ideologies. I don't feel like I need to
protect them from learning something specific at school. My main
motivation for wanting to homeschool my kids. And this is
also side note, a giant experiment. So if it doesn't work,
if I try to homeschool them and it does not work,
or they end up going to school for whatever reason,
don't hold me to this. But this is my main motivation.
(04:44):
And this intention that I'm setting right now remains true
whether or not we homeschool or public school or private
school or charter school, or whatever we choose to do
for school. The intention is about slowing the pace of life.
Thing wrong with public school I worked in public schools.
That was my first job out of grad school. I
(05:06):
have a long history of teachers in my family. My
mom worked in the public school system, and we need
public schools. So thank god to all the teachers out
there who are working in public schools, and to all
the parents who send their kids to public schools. This
is not a commentary on public schools necessarily. The thing
that I have noticed as I've paid attention to school
environment is how quick the pace of life moves. How
(05:31):
early these kids start school in the morning, how late
they stay at night, the demand of sports and activities,
and I mean this was something that I was a
part of too. I went to public school growing up,
and I was a part of student government, and I
was on the dance team. I was a captain on
the dance team, and we went to state and did
all kinds of competitions. And I was at school in
high school at least kind of around the clock, I mean,
(05:52):
from dark, dark, dark in the morning, you know, sometimes
like five in the morning until it was dark again
in the evening, doing all all kinds of things, you know,
being involved in all kinds of activities that were really
such an important part of my development and that fed
and nourished me in really amazing ways. It's not that
it's bad necessarily, but one of the things that I
(06:13):
have felt really strongly about is wanting to create an
environment for myself and for my kids and for my
family where we can move just a little bit slower,
where we don't have to wake up quite so early
or force ourselves to get up before the sun is
up necessarily, where we don't have to stay up late
doing homework after dinner time. Again, nothing wrong with homework.
I'm not necessarily making a commentary on homework in particular.
(06:35):
I'm just saying, if I can create an environment for
my family where we have a little bit more control
over our schedule, where we have a little bit more
control over the pace of life. Then the decision that
I'm going to make is to move things forward a
little slower. And yet this is complicated because we live
in a world where we're indoctrinated with fast, where fast
(06:55):
is the way of the world, where the faster you go,
the better, the more productive that you are, the better.
And so to move slow is incredibly countercultural. And I'll
say this too, in the month of December in particular,
for whatever reason, it feels like slow is even more
countercultural than it is in other times of the year.
And it's strange because when you think about nature, speaking
(07:18):
of nature and how nature responds to the cold and
the winter, this time of year, setting in nature moves
even slower now than it does in the summertime. And
yet we kind of take our time off during the
summertime and slow things down and everyone goes on vacation.
But then in December, it's like the pace just speeds
up astronomically and we're going one thousand miles a minute.
(07:42):
We have all these parties, we have all these activities,
we have all these things to be at events, appearances,
work stuff, getting everything done before the end of the year,
getting all the loose ends tied up, and it can
feel like December is this absolute sprint to the finish line.
And while this has always been obvious to me, I
think this year it has been even more pronounced, if
for no other reason than that I'm grieving this time
(08:05):
of year. I lost my dad in October. If you're
new here, and this was a really unexpected loss. My
dad had a cardiac arrest while he was on a
bike ride. And I feel like my brain is still
trying to catch up with the fact that my dad's
not here, and still moving through the realization that he's
not here, the ramifications, the feelings that I have that
(08:26):
are connected to that, and so the presence of that
grief is just an added weight and an added reminder
to go slow. It's like I can't go at the
normal pace that I would normally go at. My nervous
system just can't support it. I just can't keep up
with the normal pace. And so in another year when
(08:48):
I maybe would just go like, Okay, we're just gonna
muscle through, We're gonna get through December, this year, my
body's going no, No, we're not doing that. I'm not
going to move at that pace this time. I'm not
going to move at that this December. And so this
intention that has been with me for the past couple
of years to kind of slow our family's life down,
(09:08):
to move a little bit slower, to have a slower
and more ground a pace of life is being exemplified, exacerbated,
is being amplified this time of year, this December. And
I just keep thinking, Okay, how can I continue to
build this slowness into our existence, to give us permission
(09:29):
to not have to attend every party, to give us
permission to say no to certain activities. So, just as
a quick example, over Thanksgiving, we had but my mother
in law I talked about this on last week's episode.
But my mother in law's house is newly finished. She
(09:52):
hosted the Thanksgiving gathering this year, so she's literally directly
next door to us. We had Thanksgiving at her house,
which was so sweet and special. I made the turkey
that my dad has made every year since I was
a child, for as long as I can remember. I
used his recipe and made the turkey. That was something
that I really wanted to do and I opted into this,
by the way, over and over and over again. I
kept telling everyone. Everyone was like, are you sure you
(10:13):
want to make the turkey. I'm like, yes, I absolutely
want to do this. This is something that feels really
important to me. I don't care about any of the
other sides when I'm making the turkey. This year, we
had a friend of mine and her son and her
partner over to the house also for dinner, and so
it was a small gathering. It was me and my
husband and our kids, my mother in law, my brother
(10:34):
in law, and then our friend, her partner and then
her child also and so like under, what is that
ten people at the gathering. It was not a massive gathering,
and we tried to keep things as simple as possible.
Like I said, I made the turkey, my mother in law,
I made a bunch of the other sides. We kept
things kind of at a bare minimum. And I was
the whole time thinking to myself like, Okay, we're going
(10:55):
to keep it simple. We're going to move really slow.
I'm not going to be running all over town trying
to get as many ingredients as possible to make as
many sides as possible. I was very conscious of keeping
things nice and slow and easy, and choosing every decision
I made along the way with that intention in mind.
And yet during Thanksgiving and after Thanksgiving, and this was
(11:17):
mostly because of the grief, but during and after the day,
I just felt my nervous system on absolute complete overload.
It was like I wanted to do this. I enjoyed
the moment on the one hand, and also the experience
of being with that many people in the room and
having that much stuff going on and having my kids
running around. It was fun. It was really fun, and
(11:40):
I loved every minute. And also and also my nervous
system was maxed out. And I just wonder if I'm
not the only one who's feeling this. I know I
have the loss of my dad that's kind of layering
on top of this, But we've also all all of us,
every single one of us been through so much in
the last four years, in particular since March of twenty twenty,
(12:01):
when the pandemic happened. Every single one of us has
been through massive life transitions, lots of changes. Even if
you haven't been through stuff personally, we're going through so
much collectively. There's so much happening in the world that
you are absorbing and taking in and it's saturating us.
And there's a sense of heaviness to that that all
(12:22):
of that stuff that's taking place around us energetically in
the world has to be metabolized. It has to be
otherwise it just sits inside of you. It's like a
sponge that has absorbed all of the moisture, but it
hasn't been squeezed out. So the sponge just gets heavier
and heavier and heavier, and after a while it can't
absorb anymore. It just can't. It's reached its capacity. And
(12:43):
so for every single one of us, no matter what
you've been through, no matter what the last five years
have looked like for you, you've absorbed a lot. And
I just want you to take that in for a
second and let it be okay that you've absorbed a
lot and you are at capacity. And it will look
different for us, every single person. And so the pace
that feels good for you will be different than the
pace that feels good for me. And maybe for you
(13:05):
going out and going to all these parties feels great
and all these activities or whatever, and maybe you, like me,
are having a hard time absorbing more energy, more activity,
more chaos around you, more things on the calendar, more stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff,
even physical stuff in our house is making me feel
(13:27):
overwhelmed right now, and I'm in like a purge, a
purge season. So I don't know how that lands for
you or where you are specifically, but I do know
that as a collective, we've been absorbing so much that
we have to metabolize this. And in order to metabolize it,
there are a lot of things that we can do,
And I talked about teaching you about writing exercise. I talked
(13:50):
about that last week on the episode, So I will
teach that exercise at the end of this episode to
help you kind of metabolize what's going on. But in
order to metabolize it, have to slow down. You just
have to. There's no possible way that you can create
out of that chaos. And we don't have a lot
of control over what happens in the outside world, but
(14:12):
you do have a lot of control over what happens
in your interior environment, so meaning like in your heart,
in your spirit, in your soul, in your emotional space,
and also in your home. You may not have one
hundred percent control over what happens in your home, because
some of that could classify as kind of outside stuff, like,
for example, my kids are slightly wild, so I don't
have total control over what they choose to do in
(14:33):
any given moment. I don't have control over them. I'm
not going to try to take control over them. And
but and also I recently hired a coach to help
me as a parent to get a little bit better
about setting boundaries and creating a common environment and stepping
into a position of leadership with my kids so that
(14:56):
I can create a more common environment in my home
so that all of us can thrive. And that's a
whole other topic that I don't want to necessarily get
into right this second. But I'm saying that to say, like,
I just decided, like I can't live like this anymore.
I need help taking control over the environment of my
home so that this is not a miserable place for
any of us to be. I want it to be
(15:16):
a fun and special place for us to be. I
want it to feel peaceful, I want it to feel grounded,
I want it to feel calm. And of course, we
have moments of chaos in our house and with toddlers,
everything is messy. But I'm telling you, since I started
working with her four weeks ago, it's only been four weeks.
My kids are sleeping through the night, they're taking a
(15:36):
rest time. They're sitting at the dinner table until their
food is done, which you know, I mean they're three
and four, So this is they're not sitting for twenty
five minutes at a time, but they're sitting for ten
or fifteen minutes and finishing their food and asking to
be excused and then leaving the table. So the energy
in our home has gone from being very frenetic to
(15:58):
less frenetic in the last four weeks. And this is
what I'm getting at with this episode is that you
may not have control over the world out there. You
may not be able to stop the wars from happening.
You may not be able to stop the school shootings
from happening. You may not be able to stop the
crazy political kind of jargon and propaganda and whatever all
(16:19):
is going on on social media. You can't stop that,
but you can decide how do I want to live
my life, how do I want to be what's the
pace at which I want to move through my own life?
And if you're going to choose a slower pace of life.
You're choosing something that's profoundly countercultural. And it will feel
at times like you're traveling uphill because you are. It
(16:41):
will feel like you're traveling against the current because you are.
And yet in a way, you aren't traveling against the current,
because you're traveling at the pace of nature. Look around you,
you're traveling at the pace of nature. It's a winter
right now, at least if you're in the northern Hemisphere.
If you look out of your window, you're going to
see t use with no leaves on them. You're going
(17:01):
to see that nature is slowing down, it's shutting down
for the winter. We're about to move into a season
of wintering. And I mean, I talked about this on
my Wintering episode this time last year that I've been
in a season of wintering for what feels like five years.
I mean, it hasn't been one hundred percent wintering, but
a lot of wintering has happened in my life in
the last five years. A lot of staying at home,
(17:22):
a lot of saying no to things, a lot of
you know, missed quote unquote missed opportunities, a lot of
saying no to work opportunities that could have increased my
reach or expanded my platform, or grown my business or
given me more money or whatever. I've chosen to step
back from coaching, even though I love my work coaching,
and even though it's incredibly profitable for me, and even
(17:45):
though I love my clients. But I've chosen to step
back because I keep feeling and hearing over and over
and over again that creating a slower pace of life
is of the utmost priority right now. So if that
feels true for you too, if it doesn't feel true
for you, if you're like listen, I like to move fast.
I'm enjoying moving fast. Fast works for me. Fast as good,
(18:07):
then by all means move along, move as fast as
you'd like to move, and don't let me stop you.
In fact, if you were to ask my parents, they
would tell you that from the time I entered this earth,
that from the time I was a tiny, tiny baby,
that I have moved at a lightning pace. That when
I was young, I learned to walk before I ever
(18:28):
learned to crawl. I started pulling myself up on furniture
at five months. By nine months, I was on the move,
and I was a miserable, miserable, miserable child until I
could walk. And as soon as I could walk, I
could run, And as soon as I could run, I
was happy. And that pretty much classifies it, pretty much
describes how I was as a teenager, as a twenty
(18:49):
something in my thirties. I've always had a profound amount
of energy. I've always liked moving very quickly. So for
me to sit here and say I'm enjoying moving slow,
I have this intention to move slow is not just countercultural,
this is counter to how I've acted my entire life.
So it feels disorienting to me. It's bizarre because I've
always loved moving quickly. So where is this coming from
(19:12):
and what is it about? I don't know yet, But
I am trusting this wisdom that's coming through me that's
asking me to find a way to move slower for
myself and for my family, and for the environment and
the community that I'm a part of. I'm trusting it.
I'm leaning into it, and I'm doing everything that I
can to try to create an environment where slow is possible,
(19:32):
where slow is allowed, where I have permission to move
as slow as I need to move. Here's an example
of how slow is not necessarily in my born nature,
but I've learned to move slow. Here's an example of
(19:56):
how slow is not necessarily in my born nature, but
earned to move slow. When I met my husband, I
was the type of person who would set my alarm
for early, early, early in the morning, and the minute
my alarm went off, my feet hit the ground and
I was like off and running, and sometimes quite literally.
I mean I can remember in my early years when
I graduated from grad school and was teaching, and I'd
(20:18):
have to be in the classroom by like seven forty
in the morning or seven thirty or whatever, so I
would set my alarm for four forty five. I would
get up immediately, put on my running clothes. I'd be
out for a five or six mile run, come back, shower,
get ready, get in the car, get to school, you know,
go teach all day, go to some activity in the evening,
come back home bed by nine, do it all over
(20:38):
again the next morning, and just kind of going, going,
going all day long. When I met my husband, I
noticed that he would do this thing where he would
wake up in the morning and have a slow morning.
He was equally is still equally a hard worker to me,
and has always been one to kind of work long
hours and has a similar sentiment that way. He's always
been someone who likes to work a good long, ten
(20:59):
or twelve hour day, but for the first hour in
the morning, you know, when his alarm went off at
five or six or whatever he would set it for.
He would sit for like forty five minutes or an
hour in the morning to drink his coffee, to meditate,
to read, to think, to chat with me. And this
was foreign to me at first. It was so uncomfortable
to learn to just sit there for an hour in
(21:21):
the morning. I was just like, think of all the
things that we could be getting done during this hour
that we're just sitting here. And now now I've become
indoctrinated in the way of Matt Ford, that's my husband's name,
to the point where if I have a morning where
I have to get up and move quickly out the door,
which is very rare. But if I do have a
morning like that, it feels really abrasive on my body.
(21:43):
It does not go well for me. I don't enjoy it.
I'm so used to having my hour to sit and
hang out in the morning, and with two little kids,
that hour of sitting to hang out is not quite
as peaceful as it used to be, but it's still
a really beautiful practice where we don't immediately we jump
out of bed and start prepping to get out the door.
(22:03):
We get out of bed, we get our coffee or
our tea or our try or whatever it is that
we're drinking. We sit on the couch, We have them minute,
the kids read books, they sit in color, they play with,
playtoor whatever they do, and we just have some time
to kind of slowly acclimate to the day. Now, while
I'm on the subject, I thought I would share a
couple of other things that we do as a family
(22:23):
that help us slow things down that are challenging to
do any time of year because they're kuntercultural, but are
especially challenging to do in December, and I thought I
would just share them with you in case they're helpful
for December and also for January, because January is its
own animal. Okay, January is wild. I feel like December
is kind of like all rules out the window. Do
(22:44):
whatever you want to, eat whatever you want, go wherever
you want, to have as much fun as you want.
Then January we move into a whole different kind of
fast pace, which is like catch up on everything you
missed out on on January. So it's like only eat healthy,
you know, get to the gym, catch up on work,
get your ducks in a row, accomplish as much as possible,
get these new routines in place, get your new habits
(23:06):
in place, get yourself in order. So January and December
are similar but different. They both have this same very
quick energy to them, or can in our culture, but
for very different reasons. So if these practices, if you
find them helpful to you, then feel free to steal, take,
borrow them however you want to see it. If they
don't fel helpful to you, then you can just toss
(23:26):
them out and move on, No harm, no foul. But
one of the things that Matt and I have been
doing for the last couple of years is following a
rule that we call the one big thing a day rule.
The one big thing a day rule means that we
only do one big thing a day. That's exactly how
it sounds now. When I first started doing this, I
was like, wait, what, how can I only do one
(23:48):
big thing a day? That feels impossible. There's so many
things that need to get done today, how will I
ever get them all accomplished? And here's the thing. I
do lots more things in a day. I don't just
do one thing in a day, but I only do
one big thing. So a day in the week becomes
about one outing, one activity, one project, one effort, one
(24:11):
big thing, and then anything else that gets done in
that day is secondary. Lots of things get done, the
dishes get done, there's meals that are made, whatever, those
are things that have to get done as part of
the day, or things on my to do list get
checked off, just like, Oh, I happen to be in
the neighborhood, so I picked up this thing. But I'm
not going to plan in one day, for example, a
(24:31):
big trip to the mall and also a party. For
the most part, I'm not going to plan two Christmas parties.
For the most part, I'm not going to plan, you know,
a big Thanksgiving dinner and also an outing to see
Christmas lights. For the most part, I'm not going to
plan those two things in one day. It's I'm not
saying it will never ever happen, but this is a
(24:52):
general rule that Matt and I like to live by
we do one big thing in a day. So if
there's a project that we need to work on, like
cleaning out the garage or something like that, then that's
the project that kind of dictates the day. And if
there's a place that we need to go, a big
outing that we want to do with the kids, or
something fun we want to do, that's the outing that
kind of dictates the day. I'm not going to go
to Costco on the same day that I take the
(25:13):
kids to the zoo. It's just not going to happen.
It's two big things and they don't fit in one day.
Oh my gosh, just thinking about that kind of gives
me hives. Doing both of those things in one day.
It's a lot on the nervous system. It's a lot
to expect of yourself. And if you're someone like me
who's like, well, we can that's sure, we can tackle that,
we can accomplish that, then take a minute to think
about what it might feel like to not force yourself
(25:37):
to accomplish as much as you could. Of course, you
could accomplish it in a day, but what would it
feel like to let yourself off the hook? And give
yourself permission to slow way down. So that's one rule.
And I use rule in air quotes because we do
break the rule sometimes when it's necessary, but for the
most part, we follow this rule. We only do one
big thing a day. Another rule air quotes rule Matt
(26:00):
and I have started to follow in the last couple
of years is the rule of waiting twenty four hours
to make a decision. When Matt and I first met
and were dating, and even when we first got married
and didn't have kids yet, we were double income no kids,
as they say, and so we had a lot of
kind of extra breathing room in our budget. And I
(26:20):
say budget, but we didn't even really budget. I mean,
we had like a top line number that we knew
we spent each month. But we didn't sit around thinking
like how much do we spend on groceries, how much
do we spend on coffee? How much do we spend
on gas. It was just like, you spend the money
until the money in the account is gone, and then
you move on to the next month. So this is
the first time in our lives in the last couple
of years where we've had to sit down and actually say,
like Okay, here's our hard cost for the month, here's
(26:42):
how much money is left over. How are we going
to make that work? And if you've been listening for
a while, you know that this is all kind of
the runoff of making a business investment that didn't work
out the way that we thought it was going to
and us Matt and I both making some career transitions
and having kids and all of the change that life
can bring. So we're getting used to this idea of
(27:03):
operating inside of a budget that's a little bit more
restrictive than what we're used to. I mean, we still
live a really lovely life, but it is more restrictive
than what we were used to beforehand. And so one
of the things that we implemented as a way to
help us stay on budget was this twenty four hour rule.
In other words, if there were something that we wanted
to spend that was going to take up a significant
(27:24):
portion of our budget. So in our case, it was like,
if it's over a couple hundred dollars, then we're not
going to make a decision about it right away. We're
going to give ourselves twenty four hours. And we so
enjoyed the feeling of having twenty four hours to make
those decisions, even if it's like you know, you might
see something out and be like, oh, I want this. Yes,
it's an immediate yes, but giving ourselves twenty four hours
(27:45):
to really think about it, sometimes you get to the
next day and be like, actually, I don't really need
that as much as I thought I needed it. It's
almost like the dopamine hit of the retail experience wears
off and so you go like, oh, never mind. Or
you'd have the opposite experience where you'd be like, I
really want to do this thing, you know, but I'm
not sure I want to spend the money, And then
you wait twenty four hours to make the decision and
(28:05):
you realize, no, this is something that's really important to me,
and it's in line with my values, and it's worth
it to me to sacrifice somewhere else so that we
can have this item that I want to choose to
spend my money on. Having that time to kind of
breathe and think around a decision started to feel so
good to both of us that we decided to implement
the twenty four hour rule around other big decisions as well,
like going on a trip or going to a party
(28:27):
or anything where we were like not one hundred percent
aligned on it, or even sometimes we are aligned and
we'll get invited to something and we'll be like, sure,
we'd love to go, but let's give it twenty four hours,
just to make sure that tomorrow, when tomorrow gets here,
we want to go tomorrow as badly as we think
we want to go today. And implementing that twenty four
hour rule has slowed the role on how quickly we
(28:50):
are often asked to make decisions. In our culture, we're
asked to make decisions like a thousand decisions. I don't
know I'm making that number up. I've never counted the
number of decisions, but just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of decisions in a day, in any given day, and
to slow the role on some of those decisions might
feel like an impediment to your progress. In some ways,
(29:12):
it does feel uncomfortable at first. I will admit that
that the sitting still in the morning, the twenty four
hour rule, the rule of only doing one thing a day,
feels in the beginning when you start to implement it
almost like a frustration. It's like a speed bump that
you're like, looh, this is getting in my way. I
want to just get to my destination. But over time
it has started to really force us to slow down,
(29:36):
and I've begun to really enjoy this slower pace of
life that it creates for us. And this is what
I want to leave you with today. I want to
leave you with this permission to in spite of how
you came into this world. Let's just say you came
into this world as lightning fast as I did. In
spite of how we've been indoctrinated by the broader culture,
(29:58):
In spite of what December usually looks like for most
modern Americans, in spite of what January usually looks like
for most modern Americans, in spite of all of that,
in spite of what culture is screaming at us, I
want to give you permission to move at the pace
that you feel like moving, and to look at nature
and realize, oh, my gosh, nature moves actually very slow.
(30:18):
And the tree outside of my window is not at
all concerned with the fact that it's taking a break
right now, that it's slowing way down for the next
several months so that it can produce again in the spring.
It is not worried about that at all. It just
knows that this is the cycle of life. This is
how production happens is by leaning into the slow when
(30:41):
the slow is available to you. The winter is a
beautiful time to lean into the slow, to be honest,
I mean, I know, summer. This is kind of like
we have the school calendar that we live by, which
is that I've lived by the school calendar for a
lot of my life because I was a student and
then I was a teacher. And so if you're living
by the school calendar, then you're kind of off in
like July and August or June and July, depending on
(31:02):
where you are in the country, and that's your those
your slow months. But think about how nature is kind
of flipped opposite, Like it's it's nice to think about
December and January being your slowest months of the year.
What if December and January could be your slowest months
of the year. What if you could give yourself permission
to just kind of power down and not read any
of your emails, and not get on Slack and not
(31:25):
you know, record any new podcast episodes and not get
on Instagram and not make any new content and not
need to make progress on your book. You know, maybe
you choose to do those things because it feels aligned
for you, and that's fine. But what if you could
give yourself the permission to not also, And I think
that's really where I want to land, is that you
(31:46):
have all the permission in the world to move as
slow as you want this holiday season. Do not get
caught in the riptide of speed speed speed. The more,
the better, the faster, the better, the more stuff you know,
the faster you can move, the more you can accomplish,
the better, the better, the better. That isn't true. There
is a lot of nourishment, a lot of enrichment, a
(32:07):
lot of beauty to be found in the slowness of
just your life. You're allowed to slow way down and
just you know, as they say, stop and smell the roses.
Just slow down, take it in, take a deep breath,
and breathe in this beautiful life that you've been given.
That's exactly what I'm going to be doing over the
course of the next couple of weeks. I hope you
get a chance to do the same. I'm sending all
(32:28):
my love to you. Marry Mary, Merry Christmas. For those
of you who celebrate Happy Hanukkah. Whatever it is that
you celebrate, wherever you are in the world, I hope
that you get some downtime, some breathing room, and some
time to spend with family and friends over the next
couple of weeks. And I am so excited for what
we have coming in January. For this show and in
other ways too, I can't wait to share more. And
(32:49):
I'll see you back here after the New Year.
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host. I want to cover a topic that I
think is really important to this time of year. In particular,
this is a topic that applies all the time to
your creativity, your sense of you know, making something out
(00:44):
of nothing in your life and in the world. But
it's also a topic that is especially applicable this time
of year, in December, which can feel like one of
the most rushed and hurried times of year, and then
also January, which has such a specific kind of and
feel to it. This has been, you know, driven into
our brains. We've been indoctrinated with the kind of New Year,
(01:06):
New Yew mentality, and January, as much as we try
to unravel and unpack those beliefs, still has that kind
of essence to it. And so I want to talk
about how important it is to allow ourselves give ourselves
the permission to go really, really slow this time of year,
all times of year, but this time of year in particular. First,
(01:30):
I want to say that if you want to understand
the value of going slow, all you have to do
is look to nature. Every single thing that grows in
nature grows slow. And I think about this every time
that I see stuff out in the world, or read
things or see content that's from kind of like a
self help creator that talks about, you know, quantum leaping,
(01:53):
or that you can manifest something kind of like zero
to sixty out of nowhere. I'm not saying that those
things aren't posps, that miracles aren't possible. I do believe
that miracles take place, and I believe in a world
that has miraculous possibilities. And also, when you look at nature,
you see that every single thing in nature takes time
to grow. Every single thing in nature moves slowly, and
(02:16):
nothing in nature apologizes for moving slowly. An oak tree
does not go from seed to tree overnight. It goes
from seed to tree over the course of tens or
hundreds of years. And a garden grows the same way,
and the blades of grass grow the same way. And
you know what, every time when winter comes, we go
through a period of time where things in nature even
(02:36):
slow down even further. So this idea that we have
that we can move at a breakneck pace without ever stopping,
that we can just constantly race our way through our
life and never slow down, is arrogant, I think at best,
and really really damaging to ourselves and to our communities
at worst. So the idea of slowing down, as countercultural
(02:59):
as it can be, is such an important part of
being an artist, of sitting in the driver's seat of
our own life, of writing our own story, of getting
to decide the pace at which we want to move.
In fact, one of the things that I have caught
myself saying a lot in the past couple of months
as I've been telling people about this space that we're
building next door my mother in law's house, and then
(03:21):
there's an addition on the house where we're going to
do a homeschool kind of co op for our kids,
And people have asked me, like, oh, what inspired you
to do homeschooling? And it's funny because I grew up
in an environment where there was a lot of homeschooling
happening around me, and because of the environment that I
grew up in, a lot of people who were choosing
to homeschool in that time in the nineties, I guess
(03:41):
it would have been I was born in eighty three,
so in the nineties when people were choosing to homeschool
in my environment, at least in my circles, most people
were choosing to do that out of a desire to
have more control over the curriculum that their kids were
being exposed to. There were conversations around like sex ed,
I want my kids learning about sex at school. Evolution
(04:02):
I remember being a big one in science class. Do
I want my kids learning, you know that the world
started with a big bang? Or do I want them
learning the Judeo Christian kind of origin stories of the world.
So those were the conversations that most people were having
back then. And what's funny is like, I don't feel
any of that around homeschool and my kids now, don't.
I want my kids to be exposed to a lot
(04:24):
of different ideologies. I don't feel like I need to
protect them from learning something specific at school. My main
motivation for wanting to homeschool my kids. And this is
also side note, a giant experiment. So if it doesn't work,
if I try to homeschool them and it does not work,
or they end up going to school for whatever reason,
don't hold me to this. But this is my main motivation.
(04:44):
And this intention that I'm setting right now remains true
whether or not we homeschool or public school or private
school or charter school, or whatever we choose to do
for school. The intention is about slowing the pace of life.
Thing wrong with public school I worked in public schools.
That was my first job out of grad school. I
(05:06):
have a long history of teachers in my family. My
mom worked in the public school system, and we need
public schools. So thank god to all the teachers out
there who are working in public schools, and to all
the parents who send their kids to public schools. This
is not a commentary on public schools necessarily. The thing
that I have noticed as I've paid attention to school
environment is how quick the pace of life moves. How
(05:31):
early these kids start school in the morning, how late
they stay at night, the demand of sports and activities,
and I mean this was something that I was a
part of too. I went to public school growing up,
and I was a part of student government, and I
was on the dance team. I was a captain on
the dance team, and we went to state and did
all kinds of competitions. And I was at school in
high school at least kind of around the clock, I mean,
(05:52):
from dark, dark, dark in the morning, you know, sometimes
like five in the morning until it was dark again
in the evening, doing all all kinds of things, you know,
being involved in all kinds of activities that were really
such an important part of my development and that fed
and nourished me in really amazing ways. It's not that
it's bad necessarily, but one of the things that I
(06:13):
have felt really strongly about is wanting to create an
environment for myself and for my kids and for my
family where we can move just a little bit slower,
where we don't have to wake up quite so early
or force ourselves to get up before the sun is
up necessarily, where we don't have to stay up late
doing homework after dinner time. Again, nothing wrong with homework.
I'm not necessarily making a commentary on homework in particular.
(06:35):
I'm just saying, if I can create an environment for
my family where we have a little bit more control
over our schedule, where we have a little bit more
control over the pace of life. Then the decision that
I'm going to make is to move things forward a
little slower. And yet this is complicated because we live
in a world where we're indoctrinated with fast, where fast
(06:55):
is the way of the world, where the faster you go,
the better, the more productive that you are, the better.
And so to move slow is incredibly countercultural. And I'll
say this too, in the month of December in particular,
for whatever reason, it feels like slow is even more
countercultural than it is in other times of the year.
And it's strange because when you think about nature, speaking
(07:18):
of nature and how nature responds to the cold and
the winter, this time of year, setting in nature moves
even slower now than it does in the summertime. And
yet we kind of take our time off during the
summertime and slow things down and everyone goes on vacation.
But then in December, it's like the pace just speeds
up astronomically and we're going one thousand miles a minute.
(07:42):
We have all these parties, we have all these activities,
we have all these things to be at events, appearances,
work stuff, getting everything done before the end of the year,
getting all the loose ends tied up, and it can
feel like December is this absolute sprint to the finish line.
And while this has always been obvious to me, I
think this year it has been even more pronounced, if
for no other reason than that I'm grieving this time
(08:05):
of year. I lost my dad in October. If you're
new here, and this was a really unexpected loss. My
dad had a cardiac arrest while he was on a
bike ride. And I feel like my brain is still
trying to catch up with the fact that my dad's
not here, and still moving through the realization that he's
not here, the ramifications, the feelings that I have that
(08:26):
are connected to that, and so the presence of that
grief is just an added weight and an added reminder
to go slow. It's like I can't go at the
normal pace that I would normally go at. My nervous
system just can't support it. I just can't keep up
with the normal pace. And so in another year when
(08:48):
I maybe would just go like, Okay, we're just gonna
muscle through, We're gonna get through December, this year, my
body's going no, No, we're not doing that. I'm not
going to move at that pace this time. I'm not
going to move at that this December. And so this
intention that has been with me for the past couple
of years to kind of slow our family's life down,
(09:08):
to move a little bit slower, to have a slower
and more ground a pace of life is being exemplified, exacerbated,
is being amplified this time of year, this December. And
I just keep thinking, Okay, how can I continue to
build this slowness into our existence, to give us permission
(09:29):
to not have to attend every party, to give us
permission to say no to certain activities. So, just as
a quick example, over Thanksgiving, we had but my mother
in law I talked about this on last week's episode.
But my mother in law's house is newly finished. She
(09:52):
hosted the Thanksgiving gathering this year, so she's literally directly
next door to us. We had Thanksgiving at her house,
which was so sweet and special. I made the turkey
that my dad has made every year since I was
a child, for as long as I can remember. I
used his recipe and made the turkey. That was something
that I really wanted to do and I opted into this,
by the way, over and over and over again. I
kept telling everyone. Everyone was like, are you sure you
(10:13):
want to make the turkey. I'm like, yes, I absolutely
want to do this. This is something that feels really
important to me. I don't care about any of the
other sides when I'm making the turkey. This year, we
had a friend of mine and her son and her
partner over to the house also for dinner, and so
it was a small gathering. It was me and my
husband and our kids, my mother in law, my brother
(10:34):
in law, and then our friend, her partner and then
her child also and so like under, what is that
ten people at the gathering. It was not a massive gathering,
and we tried to keep things as simple as possible.
Like I said, I made the turkey, my mother in law,
I made a bunch of the other sides. We kept
things kind of at a bare minimum. And I was
the whole time thinking to myself like, Okay, we're going
(10:55):
to keep it simple. We're going to move really slow.
I'm not going to be running all over town trying
to get as many ingredients as possible to make as
many sides as possible. I was very conscious of keeping
things nice and slow and easy, and choosing every decision
I made along the way with that intention in mind.
And yet during Thanksgiving and after Thanksgiving, and this was
(11:17):
mostly because of the grief, but during and after the day,
I just felt my nervous system on absolute complete overload.
It was like I wanted to do this. I enjoyed
the moment on the one hand, and also the experience
of being with that many people in the room and
having that much stuff going on and having my kids
running around. It was fun. It was really fun, and
(11:40):
I loved every minute. And also and also my nervous
system was maxed out. And I just wonder if I'm
not the only one who's feeling this. I know I
have the loss of my dad that's kind of layering
on top of this, But we've also all all of us,
every single one of us been through so much in
the last four years, in particular since March of twenty twenty,
(12:01):
when the pandemic happened. Every single one of us has
been through massive life transitions, lots of changes. Even if
you haven't been through stuff personally, we're going through so
much collectively. There's so much happening in the world that
you are absorbing and taking in and it's saturating us.
And there's a sense of heaviness to that that all
(12:22):
of that stuff that's taking place around us energetically in
the world has to be metabolized. It has to be
otherwise it just sits inside of you. It's like a
sponge that has absorbed all of the moisture, but it
hasn't been squeezed out. So the sponge just gets heavier
and heavier and heavier, and after a while it can't
absorb anymore. It just can't. It's reached its capacity. And
(12:43):
so for every single one of us, no matter what
you've been through, no matter what the last five years
have looked like for you, you've absorbed a lot. And
I just want you to take that in for a
second and let it be okay that you've absorbed a
lot and you are at capacity. And it will look
different for us, every single person. And so the pace
that feels good for you will be different than the
pace that feels good for me. And maybe for you
(13:05):
going out and going to all these parties feels great
and all these activities or whatever, and maybe you, like me,
are having a hard time absorbing more energy, more activity,
more chaos around you, more things on the calendar, more stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff,
even physical stuff in our house is making me feel
(13:27):
overwhelmed right now, and I'm in like a purge, a
purge season. So I don't know how that lands for
you or where you are specifically, but I do know
that as a collective, we've been absorbing so much that
we have to metabolize this. And in order to metabolize it,
there are a lot of things that we can do,
And I talked about teaching you about writing exercise. I talked
(13:50):
about that last week on the episode, So I will
teach that exercise at the end of this episode to
help you kind of metabolize what's going on. But in
order to metabolize it, have to slow down. You just
have to. There's no possible way that you can create
out of that chaos. And we don't have a lot
of control over what happens in the outside world, but
(14:12):
you do have a lot of control over what happens
in your interior environment, so meaning like in your heart,
in your spirit, in your soul, in your emotional space,
and also in your home. You may not have one
hundred percent control over what happens in your home, because
some of that could classify as kind of outside stuff, like,
for example, my kids are slightly wild, so I don't
have total control over what they choose to do in
(14:33):
any given moment. I don't have control over them. I'm
not going to try to take control over them. And
but and also I recently hired a coach to help
me as a parent to get a little bit better
about setting boundaries and creating a common environment and stepping
into a position of leadership with my kids so that
(14:56):
I can create a more common environment in my home
so that all of us can thrive. And that's a
whole other topic that I don't want to necessarily get
into right this second. But I'm saying that to say, like,
I just decided, like I can't live like this anymore.
I need help taking control over the environment of my
home so that this is not a miserable place for
any of us to be. I want it to be
(15:16):
a fun and special place for us to be. I
want it to feel peaceful, I want it to feel grounded,
I want it to feel calm. And of course, we
have moments of chaos in our house and with toddlers,
everything is messy. But I'm telling you, since I started
working with her four weeks ago, it's only been four weeks.
My kids are sleeping through the night, they're taking a
(15:36):
rest time. They're sitting at the dinner table until their
food is done, which you know, I mean they're three
and four, So this is they're not sitting for twenty
five minutes at a time, but they're sitting for ten
or fifteen minutes and finishing their food and asking to
be excused and then leaving the table. So the energy
in our home has gone from being very frenetic to
(15:58):
less frenetic in the last four weeks. And this is
what I'm getting at with this episode is that you
may not have control over the world out there. You
may not be able to stop the wars from happening.
You may not be able to stop the school shootings
from happening. You may not be able to stop the
crazy political kind of jargon and propaganda and whatever all
(16:19):
is going on on social media. You can't stop that,
but you can decide how do I want to live
my life, how do I want to be what's the
pace at which I want to move through my own life?
And if you're going to choose a slower pace of life.
You're choosing something that's profoundly countercultural. And it will feel
at times like you're traveling uphill because you are. It
(16:41):
will feel like you're traveling against the current because you are.
And yet in a way, you aren't traveling against the current,
because you're traveling at the pace of nature. Look around you,
you're traveling at the pace of nature. It's a winter
right now, at least if you're in the northern Hemisphere.
If you look out of your window, you're going to
see t use with no leaves on them. You're going
(17:01):
to see that nature is slowing down, it's shutting down
for the winter. We're about to move into a season
of wintering. And I mean, I talked about this on
my Wintering episode this time last year that I've been
in a season of wintering for what feels like five years.
I mean, it hasn't been one hundred percent wintering, but
a lot of wintering has happened in my life in
the last five years. A lot of staying at home,
(17:22):
a lot of saying no to things, a lot of
you know, missed quote unquote missed opportunities, a lot of
saying no to work opportunities that could have increased my
reach or expanded my platform, or grown my business or
given me more money or whatever. I've chosen to step
back from coaching, even though I love my work coaching,
and even though it's incredibly profitable for me, and even
(17:45):
though I love my clients. But I've chosen to step
back because I keep feeling and hearing over and over
and over again that creating a slower pace of life
is of the utmost priority right now. So if that
feels true for you too, if it doesn't feel true
for you, if you're like listen, I like to move fast.
I'm enjoying moving fast. Fast works for me. Fast as good,
(18:07):
then by all means move along, move as fast as
you'd like to move, and don't let me stop you.
In fact, if you were to ask my parents, they
would tell you that from the time I entered this earth,
that from the time I was a tiny, tiny baby,
that I have moved at a lightning pace. That when
I was young, I learned to walk before I ever
(18:28):
learned to crawl. I started pulling myself up on furniture
at five months. By nine months, I was on the move,
and I was a miserable, miserable, miserable child until I
could walk. And as soon as I could walk, I
could run, And as soon as I could run, I
was happy. And that pretty much classifies it, pretty much
describes how I was as a teenager, as a twenty
(18:49):
something in my thirties. I've always had a profound amount
of energy. I've always liked moving very quickly. So for
me to sit here and say I'm enjoying moving slow,
I have this intention to move slow is not just countercultural,
this is counter to how I've acted my entire life.
So it feels disorienting to me. It's bizarre because I've
always loved moving quickly. So where is this coming from
(19:12):
and what is it about? I don't know yet, But
I am trusting this wisdom that's coming through me that's
asking me to find a way to move slower for
myself and for my family, and for the environment and
the community that I'm a part of. I'm trusting it.
I'm leaning into it, and I'm doing everything that I
can to try to create an environment where slow is possible,
(19:32):
where slow is allowed, where I have permission to move
as slow as I need to move. Here's an example
of how slow is not necessarily in my born nature,
but I've learned to move slow. Here's an example of
(19:56):
how slow is not necessarily in my born nature, but
earned to move slow. When I met my husband, I
was the type of person who would set my alarm
for early, early, early in the morning, and the minute
my alarm went off, my feet hit the ground and
I was like off and running, and sometimes quite literally.
I mean I can remember in my early years when
I graduated from grad school and was teaching, and I'd
(20:18):
have to be in the classroom by like seven forty
in the morning or seven thirty or whatever, so I
would set my alarm for four forty five. I would
get up immediately, put on my running clothes. I'd be
out for a five or six mile run, come back, shower,
get ready, get in the car, get to school, you know,
go teach all day, go to some activity in the evening,
come back home bed by nine, do it all over
(20:38):
again the next morning, and just kind of going, going,
going all day long. When I met my husband, I
noticed that he would do this thing where he would
wake up in the morning and have a slow morning.
He was equally is still equally a hard worker to me,
and has always been one to kind of work long
hours and has a similar sentiment that way. He's always
been someone who likes to work a good long, ten
(20:59):
or twelve hour day, but for the first hour in
the morning, you know, when his alarm went off at
five or six or whatever he would set it for.
He would sit for like forty five minutes or an
hour in the morning to drink his coffee, to meditate,
to read, to think, to chat with me. And this
was foreign to me at first. It was so uncomfortable
to learn to just sit there for an hour in
(21:21):
the morning. I was just like, think of all the
things that we could be getting done during this hour
that we're just sitting here. And now now I've become
indoctrinated in the way of Matt Ford, that's my husband's name,
to the point where if I have a morning where
I have to get up and move quickly out the door,
which is very rare. But if I do have a
morning like that, it feels really abrasive on my body.
(21:43):
It does not go well for me. I don't enjoy it.
I'm so used to having my hour to sit and
hang out in the morning, and with two little kids,
that hour of sitting to hang out is not quite
as peaceful as it used to be, but it's still
a really beautiful practice where we don't immediately we jump
out of bed and start prepping to get out the door.
(22:03):
We get out of bed, we get our coffee or
our tea or our try or whatever it is that
we're drinking. We sit on the couch, We have them minute,
the kids read books, they sit in color, they play with,
playtoor whatever they do, and we just have some time
to kind of slowly acclimate to the day. Now, while
I'm on the subject, I thought I would share a
couple of other things that we do as a family
(22:23):
that help us slow things down that are challenging to
do any time of year because they're kuntercultural, but are
especially challenging to do in December, and I thought I
would just share them with you in case they're helpful
for December and also for January, because January is its
own animal. Okay, January is wild. I feel like December
is kind of like all rules out the window. Do
(22:44):
whatever you want to, eat whatever you want, go wherever
you want, to have as much fun as you want.
Then January we move into a whole different kind of
fast pace, which is like catch up on everything you
missed out on on January. So it's like only eat healthy,
you know, get to the gym, catch up on work,
get your ducks in a row, accomplish as much as possible,
get these new routines in place, get your new habits
(23:06):
in place, get yourself in order. So January and December
are similar but different. They both have this same very
quick energy to them, or can in our culture, but
for very different reasons. So if these practices, if you
find them helpful to you, then feel free to steal, take,
borrow them however you want to see it. If they
don't fel helpful to you, then you can just toss
(23:26):
them out and move on, No harm, no foul. But
one of the things that Matt and I have been
doing for the last couple of years is following a
rule that we call the one big thing a day rule.
The one big thing a day rule means that we
only do one big thing a day. That's exactly how
it sounds now. When I first started doing this, I
was like, wait, what, how can I only do one
(23:48):
big thing a day? That feels impossible. There's so many
things that need to get done today, how will I
ever get them all accomplished? And here's the thing. I
do lots more things in a day. I don't just
do one thing in a day, but I only do
one big thing. So a day in the week becomes
about one outing, one activity, one project, one effort, one
(24:11):
big thing, and then anything else that gets done in
that day is secondary. Lots of things get done, the
dishes get done, there's meals that are made, whatever, those
are things that have to get done as part of
the day, or things on my to do list get
checked off, just like, Oh, I happen to be in
the neighborhood, so I picked up this thing. But I'm
not going to plan in one day, for example, a
(24:31):
big trip to the mall and also a party. For
the most part, I'm not going to plan two Christmas parties.
For the most part, I'm not going to plan, you know,
a big Thanksgiving dinner and also an outing to see
Christmas lights. For the most part, I'm not going to
plan those two things in one day. It's I'm not
saying it will never ever happen, but this is a
(24:52):
general rule that Matt and I like to live by
we do one big thing in a day. So if
there's a project that we need to work on, like
cleaning out the garage or something like that, then that's
the project that kind of dictates the day. And if
there's a place that we need to go, a big
outing that we want to do with the kids, or
something fun we want to do, that's the outing that
kind of dictates the day. I'm not going to go
to Costco on the same day that I take the
(25:13):
kids to the zoo. It's just not going to happen.
It's two big things and they don't fit in one day.
Oh my gosh, just thinking about that kind of gives
me hives. Doing both of those things in one day.
It's a lot on the nervous system. It's a lot
to expect of yourself. And if you're someone like me
who's like, well, we can that's sure, we can tackle that,
we can accomplish that, then take a minute to think
about what it might feel like to not force yourself
(25:37):
to accomplish as much as you could. Of course, you
could accomplish it in a day, but what would it
feel like to let yourself off the hook? And give
yourself permission to slow way down. So that's one rule.
And I use rule in air quotes because we do
break the rule sometimes when it's necessary, but for the
most part, we follow this rule. We only do one
big thing a day. Another rule air quotes rule Matt
(26:00):
and I have started to follow in the last couple
of years is the rule of waiting twenty four hours
to make a decision. When Matt and I first met
and were dating, and even when we first got married
and didn't have kids yet, we were double income no kids,
as they say, and so we had a lot of
kind of extra breathing room in our budget. And I
(26:20):
say budget, but we didn't even really budget. I mean,
we had like a top line number that we knew
we spent each month. But we didn't sit around thinking
like how much do we spend on groceries, how much
do we spend on coffee? How much do we spend
on gas. It was just like, you spend the money
until the money in the account is gone, and then
you move on to the next month. So this is
the first time in our lives in the last couple
of years where we've had to sit down and actually say,
like Okay, here's our hard cost for the month, here's
(26:42):
how much money is left over. How are we going
to make that work? And if you've been listening for
a while, you know that this is all kind of
the runoff of making a business investment that didn't work
out the way that we thought it was going to
and us Matt and I both making some career transitions
and having kids and all of the change that life
can bring. So we're getting used to this idea of
(27:03):
operating inside of a budget that's a little bit more
restrictive than what we're used to. I mean, we still
live a really lovely life, but it is more restrictive
than what we were used to beforehand. And so one
of the things that we implemented as a way to
help us stay on budget was this twenty four hour rule.
In other words, if there were something that we wanted
to spend that was going to take up a significant
(27:24):
portion of our budget. So in our case, it was like,
if it's over a couple hundred dollars, then we're not
going to make a decision about it right away. We're
going to give ourselves twenty four hours. And we so
enjoyed the feeling of having twenty four hours to make
those decisions, even if it's like you know, you might
see something out and be like, oh, I want this. Yes,
it's an immediate yes, but giving ourselves twenty four hours
(27:45):
to really think about it, sometimes you get to the
next day and be like, actually, I don't really need
that as much as I thought I needed it. It's
almost like the dopamine hit of the retail experience wears
off and so you go like, oh, never mind. Or
you'd have the opposite experience where you'd be like, I
really want to do this thing, you know, but I'm
not sure I want to spend the money, And then
you wait twenty four hours to make the decision and
(28:05):
you realize, no, this is something that's really important to me,
and it's in line with my values, and it's worth
it to me to sacrifice somewhere else so that we
can have this item that I want to choose to
spend my money on. Having that time to kind of
breathe and think around a decision started to feel so
good to both of us that we decided to implement
the twenty four hour rule around other big decisions as well,
like going on a trip or going to a party
(28:27):
or anything where we were like not one hundred percent
aligned on it, or even sometimes we are aligned and
we'll get invited to something and we'll be like, sure,
we'd love to go, but let's give it twenty four hours,
just to make sure that tomorrow, when tomorrow gets here,
we want to go tomorrow as badly as we think
we want to go today. And implementing that twenty four
hour rule has slowed the role on how quickly we
(28:50):
are often asked to make decisions. In our culture, we're
asked to make decisions like a thousand decisions. I don't
know I'm making that number up. I've never counted the
number of decisions, but just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of decisions in a day, in any given day, and
to slow the role on some of those decisions might
feel like an impediment to your progress. In some ways,
(29:12):
it does feel uncomfortable at first. I will admit that
that the sitting still in the morning, the twenty four
hour rule, the rule of only doing one thing a day,
feels in the beginning when you start to implement it
almost like a frustration. It's like a speed bump that
you're like, looh, this is getting in my way. I
want to just get to my destination. But over time
it has started to really force us to slow down,
(29:36):
and I've begun to really enjoy this slower pace of
life that it creates for us. And this is what
I want to leave you with today. I want to
leave you with this permission to in spite of how
you came into this world. Let's just say you came
into this world as lightning fast as I did. In
spite of how we've been indoctrinated by the broader culture,
(29:58):
In spite of what December usually looks like for most
modern Americans, in spite of what January usually looks like
for most modern Americans, in spite of all of that,
in spite of what culture is screaming at us, I
want to give you permission to move at the pace
that you feel like moving, and to look at nature
and realize, oh, my gosh, nature moves actually very slow.
(30:18):
And the tree outside of my window is not at
all concerned with the fact that it's taking a break
right now, that it's slowing way down for the next
several months so that it can produce again in the spring.
It is not worried about that at all. It just
knows that this is the cycle of life. This is
how production happens is by leaning into the slow when
(30:41):
the slow is available to you. The winter is a
beautiful time to lean into the slow, to be honest,
I mean, I know, summer. This is kind of like
we have the school calendar that we live by, which
is that I've lived by the school calendar for a
lot of my life because I was a student and
then I was a teacher. And so if you're living
by the school calendar, then you're kind of off in
like July and August or June and July, depending on
(31:02):
where you are in the country, and that's your those
your slow months. But think about how nature is kind
of flipped opposite, Like it's it's nice to think about
December and January being your slowest months of the year.
What if December and January could be your slowest months
of the year. What if you could give yourself permission
to just kind of power down and not read any
of your emails, and not get on Slack and not
(31:25):
you know, record any new podcast episodes and not get
on Instagram and not make any new content and not
need to make progress on your book. You know, maybe
you choose to do those things because it feels aligned
for you, and that's fine. But what if you could
give yourself the permission to not also, And I think
that's really where I want to land, is that you
(31:46):
have all the permission in the world to move as
slow as you want this holiday season. Do not get
caught in the riptide of speed speed speed. The more,
the better, the faster, the better, the more stuff you know,
the faster you can move, the more you can accomplish,
the better, the better, the better. That isn't true. There
is a lot of nourishment, a lot of enrichment, a
(32:07):
lot of beauty to be found in the slowness of
just your life. You're allowed to slow way down and
just you know, as they say, stop and smell the roses.
Just slow down, take it in, take a deep breath,
and breathe in this beautiful life that you've been given.
That's exactly what I'm going to be doing over the
course of the next couple of weeks. I hope you
get a chance to do the same. I'm sending all
(32:28):
my love to you. Marry Mary, Merry Christmas. For those
of you who celebrate Happy Hanukkah. Whatever it is that
you celebrate, wherever you are in the world, I hope
that you get some downtime, some breathing room, and some
time to spend with family and friends over the next
couple of weeks. And I am so excited for what
we have coming in January. For this show and in
other ways too, I can't wait to share more. And
(32:49):
I'll see you back here after the New Year.
Feeling Things with Amy & Kat News
Host
Amy Brown
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