TRADING IN THE HUSTLE AND BUSTLE
It’s a trend that’s pushing back against the unforgiving pace of our over-scheduled lives
From hip coffee shops and cool taco joints to long dog walks and staring out over the lake, one family’s journey through the ‘slow-living’ movement.
A camping trip two years ago changed life for Paula Coop McCrory’s family dramatically.
During a Labour Day weekend at Sibbald Point Provincial Park on Lake Simcoe, her husband suggested they take a look at local real estate listings.
The couple had been talking for a while about moving to the country from Toronto’s East Danforth neighbourhood once their kids were grown. But that would still be 10 or 15 years out.
Nevertheless, Coop McCrory plugged her long wish list into the Multiple Listing Service and up popped their dream home — a spacious house on about an acre of property in Keswick, population 27,000.
“It all kind of fell in place from there,” she says. Their three young sons loved the idea of all that space, so they made an offer and moved in that fall.
The family has traded a crammed city schedule for one with loads of unstructured outdoor time year-round. Coop McCrory and her husband spend less time at hip coffee shops or in line to try a new taco joint, and instead take hour-long walks with their dogs on weekend days.
“Date night might be we get coffee and sit on the public dock to look at the lake,” she says. “The way that you connect kind of changes.”
Coop McCrory and her crew are part of a growing “slow living” movement — a cultural trend that’s pushing back against the unforgiving pace of our hyper-connected and over-scheduled lives.
The movement has its roots in the slow food movement back in the late 1980s. But it’s only grown more relevant to parents as we contend with the stressful and time-starved nature of contemporary family life.
“I’ll always have a soft spot for city living. But by making this change, it’s just allowed me to let go of an element of white noise that I didn’t even realize I was holding onto,” she says.
Australian author Brooke McAlary began chronicling her own journey toward slower living seven years ago on her popular blog Slow Your Home.
She writes about the changes her family has put in place to have a less crazy-making lifestyle in her new book Slow: Simple Living for a Frantic World.
When McAlary started to explore these topics, her life was neither slow nor intentional. “I was living a very mindlessly busy life,” she says.
At the time, McAlary was running a jewelry business from a backyard studio, making every piece by hand. She had a little girl and a second baby on the way, and her husband was commuting three-and-a-half hours daily. “It was just so overwhelmingly frantic. I never felt at peace.”
But she was forced to confront that way of living by the severe case of postpartum depression that sidelined her after her son was born. Googling “how to simplify my life” brought her to the blog Zen Habits by Leo Babauta. Doing that reading and getting help for her depression set her on a path that would eventually lead her to shutter the jewelry business and start writing about slow living.
Not everyone can move to the country or quit their business to become a writer. But it is possible to apply slow-living principles to your life even when you have to contend with some of the systemic issues that put a lot of pressure on parents — a school day that ends hours earlier than the workday, for instance.
“Figuring out how to structure family life around those time constraints while still creating space for each other is such a huge pressure,” says McAlary. Instead, she encourages parents to find “micro moments” of focused attention, rather than pressuring them to have a weekly family game night that might not be feasible.
It can start with more mindful use of our ever-distracting phones — leaving them in another room while greeting our kids at the end of the workday, says McAlary.
It can also mean cutting back the extracurricular activities, committees and events that fill our calendars, she says.
“I used to be someone who would say yes to everything, every invitation, every request to join a committee, because I didn’t want to disappoint people,” says McAlary.
Learning to say no means more time for the things that matter to her most.
Jennifer Powell’s shift to a slower life began when tragedy forced her to confront just how fleeting time can be. “A dear friend passed away, so it kind of gave us that mortality motivation of: tomorrow can really easily become never,” says Powell.
She and her husband sold their house to take the kids on the big trip they’d dreamed about. But the six months they spent in mostly underdeveloped countries were only the beginning.
“We sat in the present when we were on the trip, which really allowed us to connect much deeper as a family than we ever had before,” she says.
When the family returned, they scaled back the kids’ activities. Today their 11-year-old daughter is in one art program and their 12-year-old son is in air cadets and that’s it.
That’s left far more time together in the evenings compared to the exhausting schedule they kept before, which often meant wolfing down peanut butter wraps in the car instead of gathering together at the table.
Her big perspective shift, plus spending less on both extracurricular activities and stuff, means the work hustle is now less important for Powell, who is self-employed, than it was before.
“I no longer weigh money as my ultimate success metric.” At the end of her life, says Powell, “no one is going to say, ‘Oh, she did a really good job making six figures.’”