Stretching Your Timelines
Getting out from under the immediacy of modern goals
Today I have a collection of thoughts for you on slowing living. Specifically on slowing down your experience of time and increasing the fulfilment you get out of each phase of life.
Modern Life Is Too Convenient
The main issue I have with social media and being online in general is the way it snatches our time away. Not in the sense that we waste a lot of time scrolling or because notifications are deeply distracting.
I mean that with the increasing speed of life, fuelled by digital progression, everything has almost become too convenient.
We’ve forgotten how to wait for things.
The space between an idea or desire forming in our minds and when we expect to achieve it has become virtually non existent. This pull to instantaneous results causes so much unnecessary anxious tension. The sense of failure is never far away when you put so much pressure on yourself for things to be an instant success.
There is magic in waiting for things.
My proposal for you is to practice detaching from the immediacy of achievement. Allow yourself to sit in that tension of wanting something that might not happen for years, or even decades. Devote your life to it.
As much as you can be, be present in each season you’re in so that you can fully enjoy the next. Presence has a cumulative effect. The satisfaction builds as you gather the lessons and experience of a life well lived.
Visualise your 80 year old self
What would she say to you? Slow down, there is no rush.
She’d want you to be fully available for it all. Every joy, every problem, every special moment. She’d want you to hold each memory, feel every emotion. She’d encourage you to steep yourself in the depths of life’s transitions - adolescence, matrescence, sagescence, and every season you experience as life unfolds.
Don’t leave her feeling unfulfilled.
What would it look like to not have goals for a while?
There are some times in life that are suited to releasing yourself from the pressure of having goals. Early motherhood is one of them. Grief is another. Actively taking time to celebrate the achievement of one goal before taking on more is another again. Even Winter knows the power of pausing.
A fallow period after growth looks like stillness but there’s a lot going on. Its restoration, gathering of resources, energy intensifying. Spring is loading. It’s never forever.
Can you imagine creating a bubble within which you don’t expect too much of yourself? Where you pare back to the essentials. I’ve said before that it’s ok to coast sometimes. It’s self care.
Some people will come to this life pause moment through burn out. If you’re reading this and thinking it’s not possible for you to ‘do less’ then I gently suggest that you might be closer to burn out than you think.
We are not machines. Rest is essential.
Not having a goal to work towards could be your goal. Just try it for a period of time to see what happens. Do you really think you’ll sit on the couch for the rest of your days if you don’t have something to work towards?
Or could it be that what you truly want emerges from the depths of you? What if having no goals is the secret to getting what you truly want?
An Effective Way To Stretch Your Timelines
Once you’ve experienced what it feels like to have no goals, I have a new approach for you to try. My alternative to SMART goals is the idea of SLOW goals. That is Seasonal/Sustainable, Long Term, Ownership, Worthwhile.
Using this framework, you tune into your own desires rather than looking for external metrics of achievement. The things you set out to achieve have meaning individualised to you. In that way, they feel worthwhile and you see them through no matter how long it takes.
Self Trust is built into this process.
Life throws up tangents, procrastinations and distractions that might otherwise seem like they are causing you to fail or lose focus. Trust in yourself to course correct, to come back to the goal in the long term, and to learn the lessons in the tangents. You might find that each diversion gives you wisdom you didn’t know you needed. You’re never going backwards. Life has a way of showing you what you need to know.
The Seasonal Analogy
I like to take a seasonal approach with most aspects of life and goal setting is one that works especially well.
Working with the seasons, Spring would be the phase in which you set a goal, make the plan and plant the metaphorical seeds for what you want to grow. Summer is the active growth phase, where you do the work, seek external resources and execute. Autumn is the time to finalise, deliver, harvest and prune. Between Autumn and Winter, comes celebration, taking time to recognise what you have achieved. Then finally, Winter is the time to reflect, restore, slow down and replenish your resources.
This totally stretches the goal achievement timeline in good ways.
Unlike in the urgency model, with this approach, I’m much more likely to achieve a goal or finish a project in a way that fulfils and nourishes me. I can be discerning over what I say yes to. Factoring in a fallow period for integration, celebration and reflection adds to the magic of the experience.
Consider your menstrual calendar
If you recognise and work with your own inner seasons, you’ll begin to notice your capacity fluctuates over the course of your menstrual calendar. Capitalism is stuck in an eternal Summer, which sounds great in theory but ‘growth only’ depletes any field, including a woman’s body.
Stretching your timelines includes making the effort to factor in this natural hormonal fluctuation when you commit to a project or goal, especially one with a timeframe. Each phase of your project or goal might include multiple menstrual cycles. Instead of pushing through and denying this side of your biology, work with it.
I used to commit to very short times. I’d inevitably hit those days when I just didn’t feel like it, or my mind was more distracted and I wouldn’t be able to give my best work. I often scrambled last minute and felt a failure. Now, I give myself at least a month for even small projects. That way, I’m more able to bring all aspects of myself and I get that sense that the project is complete.
Things Meant For When You’re Older
Can you trust that as a mother, your “second Spring” will hold gifts that you are meant to wait for?
In her book The Upgrade, Dr Louann Brizendine shares a fact I’m still surprised by but probably shouldn’t be. The age group with the highest rate of starting new businesses is women over 50. It’s true, I googled it and according to this article from Forbes, women in their 50’s are twice as likely to be successful in business than women in their 20’s.
The gifts waiting for you in your 50’s require you to learn the lessons of the previous decades. If it feels like the wheels are spinning, that you’re making no progress, that every day is relentless monotony, you feel ‘stuck’…maybe you’re meant to?
In an immediate world, it’s easy to make meaning of feeling stagnation. It’s easy to feel like you’re failing because you’re not moving forward. But what if that’s not true? Not all growth is forward motion.
Look back on your childhood experiences. How do they inform the ways you approach motherhood, both the good experiences and the ways you choose to heal and do things differently?
What about your early 20’s? Did you party too much? Say yes in relationships you wish you hadn’t? Did you talk jobs that felt soul destroying? How do those experiences inform the way you hold boundaries now, or make yourself energetically unavailable to certain kinds of people?
We learn and grow over time. So what might you be learning now that will be necessary wisdom for what comes next?
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