besieged

A short contemplation on the medicine of slowing down

Hello dear readers. I’m coming to you from my local coffee shop today. Almost embarrassed to admit the joy I get from my *half-sweet matcha latte with oat milk*. In the past I’ve taken a lot of pride in the fact that I like my coffee black and my whiskey neat, I don’t need sugar or alternative milk, I’ve got balls! But now that I’m pregnant, I am the one who orders the seven dollar matcha *half* sweet with plant based milk…And I’m owning it! I don’t have the brain space to judge myself.

This idea of brain space has been on my mind a lot lately. I don’t even have a heavy schedule right now and I find myself aching for a certain kind of internal space, a quiet, a connection to the deep stillness at my centre.

In his book Consolations, David Whyte writes about feeling “besieged”. Besieged is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and even by the creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves…

Besieged. Surrounded on all sides, unable to move freely, in or out. What a state! Can we truly experience aliveness from this feeling? I feel besieged most by my over-thinking, not being able to go beyond a busy and distracted mind. I can’t find a playful sense of discovery or spontaneity from this place of seizure. The world moves so fast, technology provides so much stimulation, there isn’t often a time I feel free from owing an email, text or call, or that I’m behind on crossing off a to-do. *Besieged* feels like a background program that never shuts off.

In my awareness of this, I find a certain amount of due relief but I crave a deeper experience. My mentor Paula often said “how you hold it is how you experience it” - and so my question has become what does it look like to hold this differently? Instead of changing all that besieges me, can I change my relationship to it?

David Whyte suggests that “Being besieged asks us to begin the day not with a to do list but a not to do list, a moment outside of the time-bound world in which it can be reordered and reprioritized. In this space of undoing and silence we create a foundation from which we re-imagine our day and ourselves.”

This is what I crave, to cultivate that space of undoing and silence. An experience of life that feels less driven by the b-line of caffeine (as I drink my matcha) and the adrenaline of ambition and productivity, and more by a quiet listening and a willingness to show up to what life is presenting no matter what my to-do list might scream for. In listening right now I hear an open invitation to slow down. I hear that the timing is up to me, but the medicine of slowing down is available in this very moment, always. And I feel the wisdom that I’ve touched upon in the past, reminding me that the feeling I crave has often come as a result of releasing myself from that “time-bound world”, from a willingness to simply be present without hopping up or grabbing my phone. There is no quick way to live in the midst of everything without feeling beset. It’s an exploration, a re-learning, a practise. Maybe creating more space for slowness each day will help us sense into that slowness when the siege is feeling particularly active. Is it just me or does this feel pretty radical?

So in the name of slowing down, may we ask for the awareness to reside more deeply in a space of undoing and silence. May we be willing to hear our bodies. May we sit in communion with the stories of the early morning birds, feel the warmth of the sun against our eyelids, learn the language of our houseplants asking for water and telling us of the building’s draftiness. May we learn to hear with our hearts and respond from the place that knows that nothing is really separate.

I suppose this is a prayer. From within the wildness of a world that gets more complex, more divided, and a lot faster by the day - I hope for us all that we learn to touch upon that deeper stillness that is always right here.

How do you find slowness?

x