slow down

Just got back from tap class. Pink roses on the table, some jazz, dim lights. Outside a wonderful spring evening. Life is beautiful.

and the first time in weeks that I start my weekend with only pleasure and no business in mind. Ah! The sun is shining, the birds are singing. I have a movie and a dinner waiting in the evening (and in a very good restaurant too) and an entire day to spend as I please. Can hardly believe it! I feel so lighthearted and happy :)

I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t even gone to all my dance classes or used my teapot. I haven’t had time to write anything on 43T. Things truly haven’t gone as I planned them to during Christmas holidays and I honestly don’t know what I could have done differently – except be more efficient in my work, which is the one thing that I’m always trying to do and that I always end up feeling guilty about.

Not that I want to complain, because my work isn’t all bad. Why else would I keep doing what I do. But I still wish that somehow I could find a solution to a certain repeating pattern, that I wouldn’t always be running after the latest deadline and would have time to just pause and enjoy the scenery. Like today :)

Happy anniversary to us!

I’m approaching the high point of the spring season at my work, which means that the pressure to take work home increases as deadlines get tighter and days before them grow fewer. And as the going gets tough, slowing down gets harder.

I have felt a little sad for this, but I think I’m only going to loose the battle if I’m trying to fight it. Which is why my plan now is to just try and take a moment to myself here and there, try to be present in what I do.

Like right now. I refused to take work home tonight and decided instead to go to work earlier tomorrow. Which gives me this chance to light some candles and sit on the couch and spend a little time with my own thoughts before curling up in bed with a book and my lovely spouse.

Oh, even in the middle of all the hassle I do love my life. Which I suppose this goal is all about.

“In 1919 the young diplomat Harold Nicolson was introduced to [Marcel] Proust at a party at the Ritz. Nicolson had been posted to Paris with the British delegation at the peace conference following the Great War, an assignment he found interesting, but clearly not as interesting as Proust turned out to find it.
In his diary, Nicolson reported of the party:

A swell affair. Proust is white, unshaven, grubby, slipfaced. He asks me questions. Will I please tell him how the committees work. I say, ‘Well, we generally meet at 10.00. There are secretaries behind…’ ‘Mais non, mais non, vous allez trop vite. Recommencez. Vous prenez la voiture de la Délégation. Vous descendez au Quai d’Orsay. Vous montez l’escalier. Vous entrez dans la salle. Et alors? Précisez, mon cher, précisez.’ So I tell him everything. The sham cordiality of it all: the handshakes: the maps: the rustle of papers: the tea in the next room: the macaroons. He listens enthralled, interrupting from time to time – ‘Mais préciser, mon cher monsieur, n’allez pas trop vite.’

It might be a proustian slogan, n’allez pas trop vite. And an advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process. For Nicolson, an early morning that had been summed up by the terse statement, ‘Well, we generally meet at ten’, had been expanded to reveal handshakes and maps, rustling papers and macaroons – the macaroon acting as a useful symbol, in its seductive sweetness, of what gets noticed when we don’t go by trop vite.”

- Alain de Botton, How Proust can change your Life

I got a teapot for Christmas. It isn’t just any old pot, but a heavy iron one, a genuine japanese thing with a faint green colour and a shape so beautiful you could meditate just by looking at it. It looks like one of those flower tea buds that open when you pour hot water over them. The deepest charm of the pot, however, lies in the way it has to be cared for. First of all it musn’t be washed at all, it is only rinsed with water after use. Which means that with time, the pot will be patinated with the aromas of the teas that have been made in it. That way it actually gets its characer from the person who uses it. Secondly, it has to be emptied and carefully dried with cloth inside and out after every use. That means it takes time and concentration to use the pot and keep it in good shape.

All this turns the moment of preparing tea into a kind of seremony. The idea fills me with immense joy. Now I have something concrete to help me with this goal, to slow me down literally and at the same time add some quiet beauty into the everyday. I am so happy for this gift!