The Art Of Not Doing Things
Written by someone who still ends up doing a lot
This holiday newsletter to my readers takes about 3 minutes to read. Please save it to read later if you’re currently hiding out in the bathroom before a shower and waiting for the inevitable interruptions from your family.
With love, Chanel.
My far-away friend,
I have confided so much in you compared to the realms of real-world or social media interactions. When a “how are you” grocery store greeting fails to capture the constant dichotomies of my life, I turn to our letters here.
When I run into someone “in real life” and they ask how I’ve been doing, how do I explain?
I want to live slow but I’m being dragged into constant productivity
I need to be alone but I also need one on one time with my kid, my husband, and my friends (now where did I put them?)
I want to create for people but I also desire to create for myself
The list really goes on and on forever, amen, until I feel nauseated by my day-to-day questioning of “Does this life align with my dreams?” Or if it’s work, “Can I take on this project considering our budget and timeline goals?”
Perhaps…my dreams are already here, in this present moment, but shrunken compared to what they used to be.
When I was a child and a teenager, I had the weight of the world pressuring me to do and see everything. As an adult, my world has a smaller focus.
My friend
summed this up so well in a recent reflection:“Younger me wanted to change the world. Older me wants to focus on my immediate sphere of influence.
Younger me thought the only way to make an impact is through my career and with an impressive job title. Older me is learning that my job is not my identity”
How do we take these big dreams and fold them like origami until they feel tangible to hold in our worn-out hands?
More importantly, how do we do less when life seems to demand more? Is there an art to slow living that I’m not getting or is the whole system set up for me to fail????
It’s been a year, let me tell ya! Or so everyone seems to say at the end of every year.
The acknowledgment of hardship is our only constant when we analyze the calendar we’re about to toss in the trash, while the new planner awaits in the mail.
When I was younger, my grandmother would use her typewriter (yes, the one she carelessly gave away to another little girl despite my love for it’s existence) to type a holiday newsletter.
This Christmas-bordered newsletter brought both anticipations of cheer and ill tidings.
Would I make the cut to be mentioned?
Would my star role in the 4th-grade play earn a sentence?
Would I be named at all? (The year my daughter, aka her first great-granddaughter, was born, we earned a whole paragraph).
I certainly don’t blame my grandmother. As a child, I took it with whole offense, but I also was a child who still believed adults were infallible. I didn’t realize that a decade or two down the road, I would be writing holiday cards and never sending them (my unintentional holiday tradition).
I also wouldn’t imagine having an email newsletter read by about 269 people in various corners of the world. There is a certain obligation looming overhead with that gift and privilege, especially at year’s end.
I constantly wonder if I deserve your time or if you’re here not due to my written labors but because you find some sort of 21st century kinship.
So here is a holiday newsletter for the readers who keep coming back for some insensible-to-me reason. Thank you for showing me you care through the time you spend at Motherhood Minute.
Will you still read my letters if I unintentionally forget to mention you?
Thank you for being here with me. Earlier this year I wrote how Motherhood Minute will always be free to read. That has not changed but this is a community that needs your help financially.
Please consider becoming a monthly or yearly donor and contributing to my efforts to provide more interviews and perhaps mental health conference events.
Upcoming:: The Winter Reflections for the Tired Mother Workbook is available for monthly members January 1, 2025
Hi Chanel,
This is so tender. I felt the softness in your words today. Your sensitive heart - what a gift! My thoughts, as I read, centered around how our Western society is structured: frenzied, fast-paced, constant activity, time-driven. I feel what you describe. I am living that dichotomy, too - the yearning for rest and silence and timelessness, but the necessity of rushing the kids out the door to be at school on time and glancing at the clock throughout the day because of appointments and mealtimes and bedtimes and picking up kids from school...
It never ends, does it?
People tell you to "enjoy this time" with your littles, because they haven't had littles around for quite some time. Maybe they forget that it's tough to appreciate a season of life when you are forced to live by the confines of time. People and places expect you to be punctual. Maybe it's a self-imposed expectation. Sure, we can eliminate certain activities. We can drop all the pomp and circumstance of the holiday season. We can do that, and in my experience, it still wouldn't eliminate the frazzled feeling of running in that hamster wheel.
So...why?
Kids are demanding of us as parents. We know that. But for those of us who are highly sensitive, we need more time to digest what's happening all around us and to us and in the world. We NEED time to slow down and think and feel and metabolize the frenetic intemperance of this culture.
To appreciate the time your kids are small - well, that means you need TIME to appreciate it, right? You need to sit for a while with your thoughts and memories and be able to smile or cry as you remember. And it seems to me that time is a luxury these days, something many of us cannot afford.
We do what we can, while living within the cultural paradigms that assign time to everything. We try to enter into the moment we find ourselves in. We try to capture in photos and videos and maybe scrap books or stories those micro-moments of levity and laughter with our children.
You are doing good things, Chanel.
So thrilled to be back reading your letters, to have the brain space to open emails and see your name sitting there knowing there will always be something nourishing inside!