I’m not very good at doing nothing. Or, more accurately, I’m very good at getting a lot done. I’m so good, I suspect that I create more work as soon as I start to run out.

Today has been a snow day. Rosie took one look at the snow and refused to budge. I cancelled my clients, and stayed at home.

I’ve got lots of things done. They’re all things that needed doing – cleaning, dealing with submissions for a handful of stones, clearing my email. I did manage half an hour walking down the white lanes, and a cup of tea with my neighbours.

However.

A phrase from the second stanza of this Raymond Carver poem appeared in my head when I was busily going from downstairs from upstairs and then downstairs again. ‘In the keep of’.

I wish I could be more like Carver on his rainy day. I wish I could have stayed in bed with the cats and piled books onto the duvet. I wish I could have fetched tea, and toast, and then later littered the bed with golden chocolate wrappers. I wish I could have put myself entirely in the keep of this glittering, snow-muffled day.

*

Rain

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain
and gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

Raymond Carver

Today I sent out my quarterly newsletter – if you’ve not signed up yet, put your email in the box on the right hand side (under the followers).

It always has a competition to win free books, and you can enter too – just send an email titled ‘Thaw’ to fiona@fionarobyn.com by the end of November and you could win one of three signed hardbacks. It doesn’t matter where you live.

It also had a link to this article on slowing down: Cornflowers and Roadkill. If you can find a quiet five minutes later you might want to read it. Happy weekends x

*

When I was young, I would tear through books like a whirlwind. Stories of new girls starting at boarding school, children packing picnics and setting out on adventures – I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next.

My dad would tease me about ‘skipping pages’, and often threatened to test me on the chapters I’d already read. At the time I felt offended, as if he was accusing me of cheating. It’s only now that I’m beginning to understand what he was trying to say.

It’s impossible to properly taste a book if it’s gulped down. We miss the sentence about the field of shocking-red poppies, and we don’t stop to consider how lonely the central character might be feeling. We can’t properly digest the meanings of words if we don’t chew on them for a while. And life is the same.

I know that I prefer living my life at a slower pace. I prefer the mornings when I give myself ten minutes to sit outside with a cup of earl grey, to listen to the sparrows chattering in the hedge and notice the silvery light on the plum trees. I prefer days when I get my writing done as well as the trip to the bank and the thirty other things, without feeling ‘used up’ by lunch time.

I’m not good at taking my own advice. Maybe none of us are, which is why we have to give ourselves the advice in the first place. I’m constantly catching myself rushing from one task to the next, or making endless mental lists of ‘things to be done’. Last week I was in such a hurry to get to work that I backed my car into a skip. I manage to clear space in my diary, and then find myself saying yes to new commitments, filling it right back up. I let my body become hurried – a tense feeling in my stomach, a pressure on my forehead.

There are many reasons for this, but I still think the main one for me is that when I slow down I’m more likely to see the uncomfortable stuff as well as the good stuff. If I really think about meeting my friend for coffee, maybe I’ll notice a tight feeling in my throat, and realise I’m still angry at her for forgetting my birthday. If I spend a quiet morning at home, maybe sadness will rise up like floodwater. If I slow the car down, I’ll see the red mess of road kill as well as the luminous blue cornflowers. We’d all prefer to look at the cornflowers.

I think I am getting better over time. I notice the tense feeling in my stomach a little earlier, and I begin more days by waking up earlier and taking things easy rather than cramming down some toast and leaping into the car. And certain habits and ways of thinking do help. My small stone blog guarantees that I stop for long enough to notice at least one detail every day. Meditating helps me to practice letting go of the future.

We can all work at slowing down our lives. There are endless opportunities to practice – when reading, when working on an urgent report, when standing in the queue at the supermarket. Sometimes all it takes is a small mental shift – ‘it’s ok if this takes a bit longer’, or ‘I’m already going as fast as I can’.

If we can start to be curious about when we speed up, and what happens when we press the pause button, change will come. And, of course, real lasting change is slow too!

*

(My book on slowing down is A Year of Questions)

I’m a TV-eater. When meals are ready I take the plate through to the living room and put something on. If I’m eating alone in public I’ll make sure I have a book with me.

Lunch today was a wedge of cheese and potato tortilla with rocket, cherry tomato and beetroot salad. None of it from the garden (god bless M&S) but all fresh and wholly delicious.

I sat at the table outside in the sun (thank you sun) and took a mouthful. Before I knew it, almost as soon as I’d started chewing, my hands were loading up the knife and fork with my next mouthful.

I put the cutlery down. I just ate. I had to keep reminding myself all meal. It tasted better than usual, I’m sure of it. I felt full more quickly. Just eating – it’s a marvellous invention!

Afterwards I lay on my stomach on the lawn (which is mostly springy, comfy moss) and read some more of John Tarrant’s bring me the rhinoceros. Here’s a little taste.

While emptiness is what’s left when you take away the thoughts and beliefs that you have constructed around an event, not knowing is a way to move in the abscence of such thoughts. It’s a creative possibility. Not knowing who you are allows you to meet an event without pretending it is something else – something that happened before. Then you might experience just what is happening: something unpredictable, delightful, dangerous, safe – eating a taco or walking down the street.

Isn’t it the best word ever?

I’ve been thinking about Brenda Ueland’s book, If You Want To Write, since writing this post about pottering. When I Googled moodling, I found this post about it. I wrote it in October and had completely forgotten about.

She recommends moodling for anyone who wants to write. Because “you see, imagination needs moodling – long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.” Even the sentence invites you to linger, to roll the words around on your tongue.

I was going to try and write something clever about how we can get better at moodling, but it turns out I’m not feeling very clever today. I’ll let Anna Akhmatova share her thoughts on moodling instead. Thank you Anna.

I Taught Myself to Live Simply

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life’s decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my doorI may not even hear.

*

I have my first ever book signing (search for Fiona Robyn) on Saturday, and I’m off this afternoon to see if I can find the kind of clothes that authors would wear. I’m not sure what they are, but it feels important. Happy weekends.

PS the book signing link was dodgy but it’s fixed now. Thanks for spotting it Pierre!

I like a good detective story, but I was especially impressed with Wallander, the new BBC series featuring Kenneth Branagh as the eponymous Swedish police detective (adapted from Henning Mankell’s novels).

The film was beautifully shot – you can imagine the camera-people (or is it the director that does that?) framing each image as if they were about to make a painting. And best of all, the scenes were s…l…o…w. They left space in between the words, and lingered on faces and the landscape. It’s only when you watch something that isn’t shot at 100 miles an hour that you notice how fast you’re used to travelling.

This dovetails nicely with this Guardian article I found via Katherine’s blog on ‘slow blogging’. It is a tribute to those bloggers who take their time when writing posts (a rare breed).

I would like to extend this tribute to an equally important group of people – people who read blogs slowly. Slowly-written posts can only be properly appreciated by readers to give space to their digestion. Here’s to less gulping.