Life at Medium Speed
Use daily anchor points to help your creativity bloom
For most of my life, I operated at one speed and one speed only: full tilt boogie. I would throw myself into any project with both feet running and not stop until it was done, often sacrificing sleep and other commitments in my wake.
That was how I rolled. My husband called me a workaholic. My kids agreed. I never slowed down, and never knew what I was missing.
Then I retired and, reluctantly, discovered life on slow. I found myself committed to the activity my husband loves most: Sailing. Almost everything happens in slow-motion on a sailboat. My husband loves the unwind of it. I am learning to float, bob, tilt and enjoy the riding of the waves.
On any sailing trip once the anchor is set, there’s not much to do but watch the sun drop below the horizon. I enjoy the splendor of the sunset, the calm at the end of the day, but most of the time, I itch for activity. Time on a boat is like a mollusk building a seashell. It seeps every so slowly and only later do you recognize how much time has passed.
On our last sailing trip, businesses, parks and beaches were closed due to the pandemic. We thought time on our boat would bring us peace while social distancing. Instead we faced a new reality: The anchorage was lovely, but with nowhere to go and nothing to do ashore, the fun had seeped away.
Time simply moved too slowly, even for my Old Salt husband. We returned to our home dock, sadder and wiser.
Time is a tyrant
Being cooped up at home raises the same tyranny of time. There’s too much down time. For people used to a daily rush, this pandemic must feel like a weight they cannot let go, dragging emotions and intentions right to the ground.
Slow life, like fast life, is not a right life.
A life on medium speed is what we need, neither a frantic race to catch time nor a surrender to time’s nothingness. We need a pace to know when we’re about to burn out so it’s time to chill, but also when to get off the damned couch, turn off the TV and for heaven’s sake, stop scrolling.
Busy days and slow days, when they come, will be a satisfying change.
Medium speed is structured
How do you structure a structureless day?
Without work or school to force you into a daily structure, it’s easy to float into a nimbus cloud of time. As it happens, retirement and sailing are both free of ordinary time constraints, so I have had some practice with the tyranny of time. This is what I’ve learned about how to manage when time doesn’t seem to matter.
Step One: Identify what you do at certain times every day, or almost every day. Everyone has certain times during the day when they naturally stop to eat or rest or do some habitual activity, like meditation or exercise. These are your anchor points, and they don’t change much from day to day. The key to medium speed is to see your day in chunks, before and after those key times.
I have one friend who always wants to be free by 5:30 p.m. so she can make dinner for herself and her husband. She tries to avoid happy hours and late-afternoon meetings, because they interfere with that anchor point in her day. She’s not obsessive, but she declines most happy hour get-togethers. Another friend likes a late-afternoon glass of wine to signal the end of the day, so happy hour is usually on her agenda. These friends plan their days around that time.
My adult daughter has languished without a job in the past several weeks, and she has found it easy to fill her days with nothing much. “I’m afraid when all of this is over, I’ll look back on this time and realize I wasted it all,” she said. Because she’s eating on an irregular schedule — only when she’s hungry — she says she’s finding it hard to find structure in her days.
I encouraged her to think about when she usually has her first meal of the day. What can she do daily before that meal? And after it, is there something she wants to accomplish that could always be done after she washes the breakfast dishes? When does she usually want to eat again? Is there a time when she knows her body likes to exercise?
Those would be her anchor points, and at first, she might have to bring awareness to what time her body tells her to eat, move or rest. Once she becomes aware of her anchor points, she can use them to be mindful of what she needs or wants to do with her day.
Anchor points are natural transition times.
Step 2: Plan your day in chunks around those anchor points. Start by scheduling yourself to do something that matters to you — something creative or life-affirming — during the time of day when you are most energetic. Humans are creative beings. Creating things makes people happy.
This is a far better way to live than bemoaning your isolation during pandemic and zoning out to Netflix or Hulu. Instead of dully looking for something on TV or scrolling your social media feeds, you’ll know when it is time to do your French lesson, or play the piano, or write or paint or dance.
In another block, you might schedule a daily walk or run. And of course, if you have a job or children, they must factor into your schedule as well. The daily structure isn’t an hour-to-hour accounting of what you must do. It’s more fluid than that.
Step 3: Schedule weekly must-do activities. Transition times are ideal for knocking off short tasks or daily or weekly things you must do, such as housework and laundry. Make your bed before breakfast but after morning exercise. Do a little housework at the end of the day before you pop open that bottle of wine. Also, allow time for things you simply like to do, such as watching TV, playing video games, or catching up on social media.
A structured day harnesses time for you to meet those bigger, meatier goals, because it makes you aware of what you’re doing with the time between.
How my medium-speed structure works
I am programmed by temperament and habit to start my day slowly. My family knows they shouldn’t try to talk to me until after coffee.
My morning anchor: I need something to drag my sleepy self out of the bed at a reasonable time, so the most structured and routine hours of my day are the first ones. I get up around 7:30 a.m., make coffee and write one to three pages in a morning journal, something I’ve been doing for years after reading The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron.
After writing pages, I go to my yoga mat for meditation and exercise, finishing by 10 a.m. I eat a small, healthy breakfast after yoga while catching up on the news of the day. Some days, there’s a yoga flow class at 10 a.m. that I enjoy (now on Zoom), so I’ll flip things around and have a light breakfast with my coffee, write my pages and read the news before meditation and yoga.
Late morning: With my mind set right and a fair amount of caffeine circulating in my veins, I shower, make my bed, and begin working on whatever tasks I’ve assigned myself for the day. Midday is my most energetic time, so my best days are the ones I spend writing at that time.
Other days I might do errands, housework, or take a walk or bike ride. I might stop and take a half hour to read. This is medium speed. When I feel myself revving up to a higher speed, I calmly remind myself there is time enough.
Lunch is leftovers or a salad, which I eat while reading or maybe catching up on a TV show I missed.
Afternoon: The large unscheduled gap after lunch is often my downfall, and it’s easy for me to waste hours on something I don’t care about, like reading unimportant emails or scrolling social media and reading stuff that catches my eye. I don’t mind doing some of that — often my best ideas come from one of those sources — but I have had many an all-day trip down the Internet rabbit hole.
When I am more focused, I can accomplish much before my next daily anchor point.
Late afternoon: Like the morning routine, this one is firm. My husband and I like to eat between 6 and 7 p.m., so dinner prep is a transition point in my day from whatever I spent the afternoon doing. Prep time could take 15 minutes or an hour. I think about dinner every morning, so I know when my late-afternoon anchor point is.
After dinner: There’s time for a walk or bike ride in the summer daylight, or to complete something I’m working on, or to sit on the porch and watch the sunset with a glass of wine. My husband and I usually watch TV for a couple of hours before bed. After dinner is the time for my less important “want to do” items, things to do when I’m tired and not likely to write an award-winning essay.
My day is peculiar to a retired life, but isn’t that what our stay-at-home lives have become? Your structure will look different, because it will take advantage of your natural rhythms and account for you must-dos.
Structure your day around your anchor points
Your daily anchor points will be related to the necessities of your life — when you must leave for work or be at your WFH desk, for example — and when you should be done for the day. Around each anchor point, plan what matters most.
Make sure you set a midday anchor point so you know when to transition from one activity to another. Sometime each day, do something for yourself, something creative, something that you love to do or have always wanted to learn.
Whether you need to slow down or speed up to medium speed, a daily structure will help you find time enough.
Be steady. Flow on.