ArticleHurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil, wrote Carl Jung. I can believe it. I’ve suspected for years that my own busyness was standing squarely between me and the life I want to be living. Lockdowns showed up the arbitrariness of all the busy; still, when “normal” life resumed, it proved surprisingly hard not to get back on the same old treadmill.
If a global pandemic offered an antidote to the drive for efficiency, busyness, and productivity, these days I’ve stumbled into perhaps an even more potent one: caring for a small child. As a forty-something first-time mum, it’s been a bit of a revelation.
With a toddler, everything is slow.
Mealtimes are slow. Getting dressed is slow, frequently a multi-stage affair. Hanging out the laundry is slow, punctuated by pauses to acknowledge what a good throw that was, or redirect small boy away from the eating of dirt. Walking anywhere is slow. Leaving the house is unfathomably slow.
It’s important for our mental health, we’re told, to sometimes just be and not do. Be less goal-oriented, and more people-oriented. Slow mornings at the playground with my one-year-old certainly fit that bill. They’re changing my relationship to time, at least temporarily. And it’s very much a discipline, as well as a joy; a chastening. Rarely now do I get to complete a task in one go, and the constant interruptions force me to make peace with a greater level of chaos and unpredictability. If “flow” is the experience of being completely immersed in an activity, intensely focussed on one thing, then this – eking out mundane chores in unpredictable fragments of time – is the exact opposite, and it’s both humbling and infuriating.
Being a parent is surely meant to make me feel like a proper adult at last. Instead, it seems almost designed to shatter my illusions of competence and mastery. My kid makes me feel like a kid again too: beset by marvels and vulnerabilities, and utterly dependent.
My fave parenting meme this week was a list of “Things I Say to My Son (That I Also Think God Says to Me)”, things like: Come here, buddy. Do you see the birds? Maybe we don’t do that. I’m with you. Wave hi to our neighbour. Tell me what hurts. I’m so proud of you. I’ll clean it up. Be gentle. I love you. It’s going to be ok.
And also: Slow down. Slow down.
This kid is the reason I can’t seem to tick much off my to-do list, and the reason I have a pinecone in my pocket. He’s why I forgot to hang out the clothes I put in the washing machine this morning, and why I finally feel like I’m doing that “living in the moment” thing I’ve struggled with for so long. If busyness is the devil, then small boy is inadvertently teaching me about how to embrace inefficiency, and let God be God.
Natasha Moore is a Senior Research Fellow at The Centre for Public Christianity. This article was first published in The Australian.