You Don't Have to Change Your Life to Enjoy It More

There is a very attractive version of slow living on the internet. It usually involves a cottage, a garden, fresh bread cooling on a wooden table and a woman in linen who apparently has nowhere she needs to be until Thursday. Her kitchen is peaceful. Her vegetables are thriving. Her phone does not seem to contain seventeen things requiring an answer. I have nothing against this woman. In fact, I would happily spend a weekend at her house, particularly if she's willing to share the bread. I just don't think we should have to become her before we're allowed to enjoy our own lives.

For most of us, slowing down cannot mean abandoning the life we already have. There are jobs, appointments, families, houses, errands and people who continue to need things at extremely inconvenient intervals. The dog will not postpone vomiting because you're attempting to live intentionally. The electric company remains stubbornly attached to due dates. Dinner keeps occurring every single night. If a slower, richer life requires everything around us to become peaceful first, we're going to be waiting a very long time.

What if we have been thinking about it backward? Maybe the goal isn't to build an entirely different life. Maybe it's to stop moving so quickly through this one that we barely experience it.

Think about how easily an ordinary day disappears. You wake up thinking about what needs to happen by noon. At noon, you're mentally organizing the afternoon. By late afternoon, you're thinking about dinner, tomorrow and the thing you forgot yesterday. You eat while reading something. You listen to someone while composing an answer. You sit down for five minutes and immediately reach for your phone because apparently five unoccupied minutes now constitute a situation requiring intervention. Nothing terrible has happened. You were there for the whole day. You just weren't entirely in much of it.

This is one of the ideas I keep returning to: ordinary time is not disposable time. Most of our lives are not made of vacations, celebrations, promotions and once-in-a-lifetime experiences. They're made of Tuesdays. They're made of breakfast and errands, conversations in the kitchen, the drive home, familiar roads, laundry, weather, dogs doing ridiculous things and meals we've eaten a hundred times before. If we require a day to be extraordinary before we pay attention to it, we're going to overlook an astonishing percentage of our own lives.

And paying attention does not mean turning Tuesday into a lifestyle photo shoot. I do not believe every cup of coffee requires a gratitude ceremony. Sometimes coffee is simply the substance standing between you and an unfortunate personality. Sometimes the laundry is not a metaphor for abundance; it is laundry, and somebody needs clean underwear. Slow living becomes exhausting the minute we turn it into another standard we're supposed to perform correctly.

What I'm interested in is much simpler. What makes an ordinary day feel good to you?

Maybe it's opening the windows while you're making dinner. Maybe it's taking the road with the prettier view when you have ten extra minutes. Maybe it's using the good dishes on Wednesday instead of preserving them for people who don't live in your house. Maybe it's calling the friend who always makes you laugh, sitting outside until the light changes, putting music on while you cook, reading twenty pages before bed or buying the peaches because they smell like summer. None of those things is dramatic. That's precisely the point. The book argues that pleasure doesn't have to be impressive to improve a life; it needs to be noticed and given enough time to register.

There is another piece of this that I think we underestimate: margin. We have become remarkably skilled at fitting things together. If an appointment ends at 2:00 and the next thing begins at 2:15, somewhere inside us is a tiny, deranged event planner whispering, Perfect. Plenty of time. We forget about driving, parking, gathering our things, using the bathroom, finding the keys and being an actual human being who cannot teleport between obligations.

A little margin changes the emotional temperature of a day. Ten minutes between things. An evening without another plan. Leaving before the last possible second. Finishing three errands instead of squeezing in six because six are technically achievable. An open hour that hasn't already been promised to someone, something or a glowing rectangle. Margin isn't wasted space. It's where life gets a chance to surprise us. The manuscript describes it as the room that allows a full life to remain enjoyable—not an empty life, but one that has enough space around its demands to breathe.

And perhaps that's the part I find most appealing. Slowing down doesn't have to mean becoming less ambitious, less interested or less alive. You can work hard. You can pursue something exciting. You can have a crowded dinner table, loud music, projects you're passionate about and weeks that move quickly because something wonderful is happening. A slower life isn't necessarily a quiet life. It is a life in which the speed has a reason.

There is a tremendous difference between moving quickly because you're excited and moving quickly because you've forgotten there's another way to move.

The question I've begun to like is not simply, How can I keep up? It is, What pace would let me enjoy this? Sometimes the answer really is faster. Get the annoying errand done. Send the email. Make the decision. Clear the task that's been sitting in your brain charging rent. But sometimes the answer is to stay at the table another ten minutes, finish the song before getting out of the car, let the conversation wander, or decide that whatever is waiting can wait until you've actually tasted dinner. That distinction—choosing the speed rather than automatically obeying it—is at the heart of Life in the Slow Lane.

You don't have to wait until retirement. You don't have to earn enough money to buy your way out of inconvenience. You don't need the cottage, the garden or the linen dress, although by all means buy the linen dress if it makes you happy. You don't have to get your entire life under control before you're allowed to inhabit it.

Maybe begin with one piece of today. Use something you've been saving. Sit somewhere pleasant. Put your phone down while somebody finishes the story. Leave one thing undone because enough really is enough for tonight. Go outside while there is still light. Eat the peach before it turns into a guilty science experiment in the refrigerator. The life you want may not require a dramatic reinvention. Parts of it may already be sitting quietly inside the one you have, waiting for enough of your attention to become visible.

Because ultimately, slowing down isn't about doing less simply for the sake of doing less.

It's about being present for more of what you chose to keep.

And there is no finish line you have to cross before you are allowed to start enjoying your own life.

---