Choosing To Make Space & Go Slow
I’m sure many of us can relate to the feeling of being more exhausted than refreshed on a Monday morning. It’s that feeling that happens when the weekend was so filled with birthday parties and sporting events and grocery shopping that you hardly got to catch your breath. On these weekends, it can feel like time is moving too fast and taking from us, when really, shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t time give back to us?
As a mom of 3 kids, including two VERY wild 5-year-old twins, I have come to be a fervent believer in the importance of building in what I call “slow flow time” whenever we can on the weekend. I’m not talking about a few quiet minutes here and there between activities, though sometimes you’ve just got to take what you can get. I’m talking about allowing our families full blocks of hours for moving slowly and choosing what we feel like doing from moment to moment.
We Go Out Walking
One of our family’s favorite ways of using these ‘slow flow’ hours is by taking long, meandering walks through our neighborhood, without any specific destination or time frame. We’ll have just a few hours of playful lollygagging and chatting as we move through our neighborhood as explorers.
Homewood—where we live—is so wonderful for this; it’s small enough to feel intimate but big enough to always have something new to discover. Sometimes we leave from our house, often ending up at the Edgewood elementary playground and Big Spoon creamery. But, often, we start at Homewood Central Park, which undoubtedly has the best playground in the area. It can be hard to get the kids to leave the park, but we can usually coax them away with the promise of what we may find next (Cookie Fix anyone?!), or by letting them choose where we will walk to next, which is usually the toy store Homewood Toy and Hobby. Here, we try to teach the kids about the idea of ‘window-shopping,’ and we let them add anything they want to their birthday wish list (we all know this trick, right?!).
I, personally, love shortcutting through the alleyways in downtown Homewood and ending up at little shops like Sweet Peas Garden Shop, where the scent of fresh flowers and greenery inevitably lead me to daydreaming about what houseplants and flowers I’ll bring home next. Some shops truly do facilitate those small moments where the world feels both bigger and slower at the same time, and I can let my mind wander. This is one of those special places.
The Gift of Grounding in Place & Time
Through walking, we are allowed to notice all of the details of our neighborhood and city that often get overlooked when we’re rushing through. For me, slow time spent walking at the pace of my 5-year-olds feels like time that is giving back to me, and it gives me a sense of belonging, of grounding in place and time. I imagine this same sense of belonging and grounding growing, even if subconsciously, in my kids, and this makes me happy.
