Moving at Nature's pace

“Our exhausting tendency to grind without relief, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, is more arbitrary than we recognise. It’s true that many of us have bosses or clients making demands, but they don’t always dictate the details of our daily schedules – it’s often our own anxieties that play the role of the fiercest taskmaster. We suffer from overly ambitious timelines and poorly managed workloads due to a fundamental uneasiness with ever stepping back from the numbing exhaustion of jittery busyness.” (From the book Slow Productivity)

I’m in the midst of reading ‘Slow Productivity’ by Cal Newport and just read this paragraph, which took me back to a moment a few years ago when the phrase ‘move at the speed of Nature’ first surfaced in my mind. In theory, this sounds wonderfully easy. We may even fantasise that leaving our full-time job with an employer will relinquish us of all constraints and finally, we will be able to live at a more natural pace. I know that’s what I used to think.?

Lately, I’ve been longing for a greater sense of stillness and peace. I have flashbacks to times in my life when I felt fully sunken into the stillness, I was spacious and my nervous system was at ease. Memories flash up: moments during the first months of burnout recovery in 2021; walking the tree-lined paths in a silent retreat in 2015; staring out into the tree covered mountains of Western Canada during a cabin weekend last summer. With these flashbacks comes frustration, wondering what I’m doing so wrong that makes these moments of stillness and spaciousness fleeting in my day to day now. I’ve done the thing that my former self so desperately wanted; I left my job, stepped away from the only kind of livelihood-making I’d ever known (having a full-time job with an employer), and ventured into the world of self-employment.?

Now, I tend to be overly idealistic and romanticise possibilities. More often than I would like, I end up facing a gap between vision and reality. This was the case with moving to self-employment. Yes, in theory it comes with endless freedom – when you work, where you work, what you work on, how you work – but stepping into life without an employer didn’t suddenly dissolve all the habits and belief systems that I’d been entrenched in since getting my first job as a teenager.?

Tracking back beyond adolescence, I have begun to understand the generational conditioning I am undoing. Coming from a lineage of people who have fled places and strove for something better. My Chinese grandparents who escaped communist China under false paperwork and re-paid their debts working in Chinese restaurants in a small Canadian town. Then there’s my mother, who travelled across the Atlantic from England at 24, seeking adventure and a new life as an au-pair in the suburbs of Toronto. There’s a hunger for the ‘new’ and the ‘better’ embedded in my ancestral lineage and therefore, in me. At the same time, an edge of scarcity and fear of not enough-ness (not doing, being, having ‘enough’) hums gently in the background. It’s what propels me when even though I know rationally I should stop ‘doing’, I don’t necessarily want to stop.?

I know I am not alone in battling with these stories in my head whose foundations are held in my body. It’s a journey of re-learning how to work. How to click into a different operating mode in a world that tells us to do more and be everything to everyone all the time.?

Moving at the pace of Nature takes work.?

I’m practising everyday.?

It’s one thing to talk about it and understand it on a rational level, and it’s a whole other thing to actually live it. As someone who tends to be an extremist, either going all-engines-blazing or sitting in silent retreat, my greatest challenge and opportunity is finding the middle ground. Learning to run fast for a bit, then stop and rest. Maybe even jog sometimes instead. For me, it’s about developing trust so I can consistently believe that doing things at a different pace will lead to greater rewards – both in terms of outcomes, but more importantly, how I experience the process. Because, if we’re only living for the outcomes and neglect the process, then what’s even the point?

If you’d like to explore more on this idea of moving at Nature’s pace, come join my free upcoming masterclass to support your transition into Summer!

Conscious Leadership Masterclass: Stay Balanced This Summer

18 June @ 5:30pm BST / 12:30pm EST

Online?+ Free

Sign up: https://www.dhirubhai.net/events/consciousleadershipmasterclass-7201158902715940864/?

A recording of the session will be sent out to all who register!