Going fast and going slow

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Life continually hammers home to us the reality of how little we control. The things we wish would go faster never do. We get caught up in anxiety and fail to slow down the moments we wish would last forever. The periods in our lives which we were convinced were the very worst while we were living them turn out to be pretty good in retrospect.

Things go fast and things go slow and we don’t have any control over that tempo. In fact, that sense of going fast or going slow is all our own perceptions. Time is what it is. It does what it wants. It could care less about our puny human experience of it.

Slow

Summer is supposed to be slow time, but it never feels that way. The days are longer. The days are so long. Some evenings I lay on our couch, glancing between the clock on the mantle and the light out the window, noticing how long the sky stays bright. It seems to take forever for night to come.

A fast sketch of nectarines ripening on our tree, which is another thing I’m waiting for…the nectarines to ripen

I guess summer is already halfway over, though I’m trying to think about it. I’m trying to spend some time outside, staring at the sky, even on the hottest days.

Fast

I spend a lot of summer monitoring what’s happening in my garden and at first, everything seems to be moving at a glacial pace. Have the tomatoes grown at all? Are my eggplant not the exact same size they were when I planted them two months ago? Is anything happening out there in the great green or has the weather gone so crazy as to make growth impossible?

Then one day I see a tiny cucumber on the plant. The next day, it’s five inches long. The tomatoes begin to ripen one at a time and then all at once, like a barrage. And the weeds, of course, are always on an accelerated timeline, the vines especially, which every day reach closer and closer toward the sky or other places I would rather them not go.

Slow

I’m working through a big edit of a novel and it feels like every morning when I open the document, I find myself stuck on the exact same page. I know that as I make changes the page number means less and less, but it seems to be taking forever to even reach the halfway point. I’m supposed to be cutting, but it all seems to be expanding instead. I’m stuck in an endless Groundhog Day of agonizing over one sentence or paragraph or page. I know the slow progress will add up, but for fuck’s sake, when?

Fast

I’m keeping up with my garden sketchbook though it’s hard some days. One of the things that’s helped is reading James O'Boyle’s tips for sketching. He reminded me that sometimes when drawing, it’s best to just go fast. I knew this from figure drawing, where we often start with very short timed sketches before moving to longer ones. Those first, quick sketches of mine are often so much better than the longer ones. There’s something when it comes to drawing or sketching that’s so freeing about going fast.

Slow

Last month (though it seems like 3 months ago), I posted this about old lady water aerobics. A few people liked it. A few more. Then over the last week or so, thousands of people liked the post. Almost three thousand at the latest count. I guess you could say the post went viral if such things still happen in this weird social media world.

It’s nice to see so many people getting joy from the post. It is a joyful thing, twisting and dancing to ‘Let It Go’ at the public swimming pool, which we still do every morning. The existence of the public swimming pool is a joyful thing. That it’s survived this long without someone coming along to tear it down and build condos is a joyful thing. That the woman who runs both the pool and the water aerobics class shows up every day to lead us through a song from a movie I don’t think she’s ever seen and in spite of being not very well paid or appreciated is a joyful thing. Being in that beautiful blue water every morning beside the river is a joyful thing. There’s so much joy.

Our amazing library has tiny art contests and though I can’t enter officially because I’m on the board, I did paint this to display with the rest of the tiny art, or at least, this is one version of the painting I did of old lady water aerobics

Fast

There have been periods in my life when I thought about how quickly the year turns over and it filled me with a sort of dread. I can’t explain exactly why. It seems a silly thing to be terrified about in retrospect, but there it was all the same. Maybe it felt like time was spinning out of control.

Of course, I know that the only place we ever truly live is in the present. It’s all we have and so hard to hold onto. Right now, I’m sitting in my writing chair in my office, looking out the window at the green hills in the distance and the rooflines of the houses on the next street over. My cat is asleep on the footrest next to my feet. It’s Sunday and in a moment, I’ll finish writing this and go see what progress my husband is making in the backyard battle against the weeds. I’ll pluck a few ripe cherry tomatoes off the vine. Maybe I’ll settle on my lounger and watch the clouds take their own time moving across the sky.

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What I’m reading

I just finished Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister, about Mary Bennet. I’d watched the BBC series and loved it so I picked up the book, which I also loved so much. If you’ve read this book and have other recommendations for a long, lovely, slow read that may or may not be Jane Austen-adjacent, please share!

What I’m watching

What I’m watching lately are the sparrows in our yard. The little birds hop around in our very vigorous vines. They clearly catch a bug and then fly down onto our sidewalk with the bug in their mouths. Then they hop around either playing with the bug or killing the bug or hacking the bug into pieces. It’s not clear what they’re doing, except that they let the bug go and then chase after it and eventually they eat the bug and fly away. If anyone has insights into this behavior, please share. It’s certainly entertaining.

Also, of course, I’m watching the Men’s World Cup and feeling a little bereft already that it will end soon. Who knew I’d ever feel like the World Cup doesn’t last long enough?