The big picture

Social isolation has cultivated a greater appreciation of the joy and beauty of slow living, writes MICHAEL McCOY

Iwas slogging away in the garden recently, on one of those days of utter perfection – sunny and windless, the calming sounds of frogs and crickets in the background. I don’t know if the effect was of some kind of thawing process, or of basking like a lizard on a rock, but every muscle relaxed as the sun warmed by back. My breathing slowed, my shoulders sagged, and the whispered soundtrack of nature rose, in smooth crescendo, to be the only thing I could hear – as if it was the only thing I’d ever heard. I was swept up into some other time zone of slowness, of moment harvesting, of living in nothing but the current, pregnant, suspended second.

This invasion of slowness has been, for me, one of the great consolations of the very great inconvenience of social isolation. Having time to get things done – time that doesn’t feel snatched or fretful. Time that could become timeless.

I’ve loved the idea of slowness for a long time. It’s one of the main reasons I became a gardener. I only had to hear sculptor Rodin quoted as saying, “Slowness is beauty,” and I found myself filled with a longing that I knew could not be ignored. And somehow I instinctively discerned that, for me, slowness was going to be found through contact with the soil and the seasons, made all the more poignant by the silence and solitude in which that contact is usually made.

Later working as a gardener, I was in proximity to some very wealthy entrepreneurial families who lived so fast that it seemed most of the joys of their gardens were inaccessible to them. Even their holidays and leisure time seemed intense. I spoke with a wise friend about how baffled I was by this blindness to the simpler things. His conviction was that people who work that hard have to relax and play that hard as well. Applying that lens led me to understand that the extent to which you can log in to the benefits of gardening is limited by the extent to which you can move in phase with its rhythms.

And you can’t rush gardens. If you try to cheat the system by, say, buying all advanced plants, it’s only you that’s been cheated. Would you adopt teenage kids to skip that annoying, demanding phase of babyhood? The joy I derive from my adult kids is amplified by a long history of nurture from those early years, and it’s the same with gardens.

Even when we know all that, it’s clear that we gardeners can fall out of phase, and that in such a mad, rushed world as we’re in, staying in sync with its ancient, slow pulse takes deliberate effort.

This recent period of enforced, meditational quiet has reinforced my conviction that I want to live slow, and play slow. In saying so, I’m not trying to convince you that it’s a superior way to live, but if you’re feeling the same, you’re not alone. Michael blogs at thegardenist.com.au