The Joy of Repsonsibility, Slow Food & “CEO Me”
This past year I have spent learning about duty, presence, and appropriateness in the process of preparing my house for sale. I took a half-time hiatus from my business to attend to the billion different tasks this involves and in the process, have found my way home again to a state of being I’d long denied. I’ve found that I take great joy in having the most mundane of everyday responsibilities, and living up to them. There is nothing more important in the world sometimes.
For the first time in a long time, I was the only person solely responsible for all cooking, cleaning and household-running. I became disinterested in obtaining what I did not have. Getting clothes and household items into plastic toters and archived in the cottage storage space was paramount, as was weeding down those items to a mere shadow of their former bulk. Coordinating the seemingly-endless garden and landscape restoration became all-important. Sister Lan and I dug pansies, Italian flat-leafed parsley, purple ruffled and sweet green basil, variegated and pineapple sage, tarragon, sweet alyssum, rosemary, lemon thyme, Greek oregano and sweet marjoram into fifty pounds of organic soil and mulch under the Meyer lemon last August. It was exhausting to do, but it’s a bang-up kitchen garden from which I actually used the herbs in our daily cuisine. Free organic vitamins, grew ‘em myself. Who can pass up a deal like that? From seed to plate, I know exactly what went into each plant. I rejoiced anew in cooking nutritious from-scratch meals for my family. These can take several hours to compile and clean up after, but the slow food movement has a definite appeal in this era of blindingly-swift-rat-race-indigestion. But I digress.
I dust, wax, vacuum and polish. The same furniture, the same tile and countertops, every day for months, again and again and again. "It’s never done", in the words of Lady Marian. I’m tired every night but happy, with a feeling of accomplishment I can’t apply to the completion of any other project. I don’t want anything more than what I have here.
Creating the perfect environment was one of the last and best personal coaching programs Thomas Leonard created before his death. Creating my environment anew every day by being in service to myself and my family isn’t necessarily what he had in mind. But in an amazing way, what worked to satisfy my mother and my mother’s mother, is what’s doing it now for me. I create my world anew each day and am grateful for it.
My maternal grandmother, Mimi, would laugh and help me bake a pan of cinnamon rolls just to dirty the kitchen for the joy of cleaning it again. She’d have joyfully chatted through three rolls and two cups of coffee to my one, embroidered a tablecloth or two and complained that I don’t eat enough. She was one of those grandmothers that made such comments no matter how fat we got, bless her. Dad’s mother, Granny Grace, would have cast a jaundiced eye at my housecleaning, declared it barely adequate, re-mopped the floors herself, cooked up several meals in advance and frozen them, mended several dresses, looked for more work to do and loved me anyway.
Girlfriends have looked at the sheer amount of housework I do aghast and say "I don’t know how you manage to do it all. You’re a superwoman!", which embarrassed, I deny. No more superwoman than my Mom – than anyone’s Mom who did the same.
Here’s a hail to the Moms everywhere, and to those who like my own mother, never thought to ask for better than their lot. Who washed, cleaned and cooked and for whom, that was enough. And here’s to us modern women who have discovered anew the joy of a spotless living room, home-raised herbs and veggies and meals you can talk to your family over. And managed to make careers and creative impulses fit in as well. We seem finally to be getting past Superwoman syndrome and getting it right for a change.
Everything old is new again. And clam diggers – excuse me, capri pants – with hot pink and lime green flower-power are back in style. Not to mention Betty Boop and 50’s graphics. Style has become a matter of personal choice, not industry standard. We’re all growing up and growing older, wiser and more discerning. We’re no longer happy to be thrust at jetspeed through our lives at the whims of our next-door neighbors, style counselors and CEO’s. Today’s Head of the Company is CEO Me. The buck stops here, and I say we eat slow, enjoy our lives and families and take plenty of time to figure it all out. When we take it slow we can fully take in the important details, when we attend, we can make more fully informed choices. I’m left wondering how we ever managed to allow ourselves to be talked into this "hurry is good, we must be first-at-all-costs" nonsense. Nothing is worth the indigestion and insanity of the current race to get-it-all-done-before-tomorrow. And even if it all ends next Friday – there is still time, plenty of time. Make haste if you must, but slowly, very slowly. Hurry is entirely optional.
As a person who processes and lives better at a slower pace, I’m rejoicing to note more people seem to be choosing a slower lifestyle. I coach professional women to drop their hectic schedules, spend more time deep in thought and meditation and never let the sun go down without listening to their families. It’s heartening to find that people are more generally accepting of such lifestyle changes. Five years ago we couldn’t race fast enough. Now, thank goodness, the balance is swinging back to a saner pace.
Here’s to our sanity, our humanity and our success…as slow as we need it to be.
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