Enjoying the slow lane
How a career shift helped me appreciate the little things
Tending to plants. Learning to cook Thai food. Growing bean sprouts. Listening to birds sing. Watching trees blossom. Practicing yoga. Taking photos. Writing, reading, and going for long walks.
All of these activities seem awfully boring, but I’ll be honest: they’re what I’ve enjoyed most in the past few months. My career had taken a left turn when a gig that was supposed to be long term — well, wasn’t, and I started a consulting practice in marketing and strategy. Benefits of working from home aside (pajamas and quality time with the cat among them), the unexpected joy I’ve found in this transition has been more time, a slower pace of life, and the ability to appreciate and be thankful for the little things.
The pace I’d been going in my career was, in retrospect, more than a little intense. It typically involved getting up early to read my feeds and the morning headlines while commuting an hour to Manhattan; taking an fitness class (somewhere cool enough to motivate me to actually work out); reading emails on my phone while drinking coffee en route to work; sprinting through 12 hours of work; then working on the train on the way home again. Those were the good days. The tough days were followed by another couple of hours answering emails, responding to texts and messages, and editing decks until I was too exhausted to be productive. But looking back, even the good days meant that I came home too mentally and physically exhausted to be of any use at the end of the day. It was all I could do to shovel in dinner, usually eaten in front of the TV with a big glass of wine in an effort to quiet my spiraling brain before falling into bed. Friday nights became an extension of that routine, where the best I could manage was streaming a movie and getting takeout — forget going out with friends or doing anything fun, I had no energy left to spare.
Every month or so I chastised myself about how we lived in New York and didn’t take advantage of the thousands of things to do in the city each week, and for awhile I would make an effort to go to museums, visit galleries, experience the theater, or go to comedy shows. But as much as I enjoyed them, those bursts of cultural exploration left me even more tired the next day. And on weekends, I relished catching up on sleep more than doing anything that required too much energy to plan or accomplish.
The truth is that it was a struggle just to get through the week without collapsing, let alone attempt anything fun, interesting, or creative on top of that. I longed for a time before weekends meant working, before overtime was the norm, before responsibility increased. I tried to remember when I’d stopped doing anything creative, and whether I’d feel more fulfilled if I took it up photography, writing and knitting again. I thought frequently about the joke of work-life balance, and wondered how on earth parents with young children made it through — all I had to take care of was myself, an apartment and a cat, and I had a husband to help! I had an inkling that all this wasn’t sustainable, but I didn’t fully realize the toll this way of working was taking on my well-being until I had the opposite experience: flexible hours, a ten-second commute, and the time to stop and think about what’s important and what I enjoy.
Turns out, what I enjoy is pretty slow and boring.
Maybe that’s a temporary reaction to the stress of working in small- to mid-sized advertising agencies. I still remember a managing director of a large firm once saying, “What makes you think we’ve got things figured out?” Sure, advertising has been around long enough to figure out how to make the operations side of the business work, but the rate of change in marketing and advertising technology is stunning. It’s also the nature of the field: there’s always new business to chase, creative to develop, strategy to research — you race from one deadline to the next, always working as fast as you can knowing that any extra time spent on one project could put you over the already-thin margin, or cause you to miss out on a big opportunity around the corner.
With that experience as a backdrop, and given that spring has finally arrived in New York City, perhaps it’s not surprising that I’ve been drawn to nature and the quieter, simpler things in life. Working next to a big window that overlooks a tree-lined Brooklyn street rather than a dark midtown corridor, I have more access to the outside world and more time to appreciate the flowers blooming, sun shining, trees budding and birds chirping.
Instead of racing to a fitness class on my way to work, I fit in runs, yoga and walking in between meetings and deadlines — thinking about fitness as a part of daily life rather than a task to be checked off. Instead of ordering takeout for lunch and dinner every day, I shop for produce and cook for our family, learning new recipes and techniques as I go — considering food as nourishment rather than fuel for the slog. Instead of working among hundreds of people talking and listening to music at once, I listen to the city outside my window — appreciating the birds that sing in the trees beyond my balcony. The hum of traffic keeps me grounded in the pace of things beyond my door, while the sights and sounds of nature remind me that life isn’t entirely about commerce and profit.
That’s not to say it’s been an easy transition. Running a consulting practice comes with its own set of stressors — the work, the contracts and the business development are still there, and sometimes they feel magnified when deadlines overlap. But the opposite is also true; sometimes I find myself with a free hour or two during the day, and the flexibility to go do something that fuels my energy and creativity instead of depleting it. It’s a vastly different experience, but I think it’s a change for the better.
Maybe someday I’ll go back to agencies and corporate life, when I grow tired of working on my own and long for the camaraderie and collaboration of working in an office. For now, I’m content to slow down and focus on what matters in this moment and this phase of life. I’ve decided that it’s okay not to chase after what everyone else thinks is important, and instead to nourish your soul for awhile. I’ve learned to find gratitude for my health and good fortune. And I’ve grown to appreciate a world where blue jays visit the garden, plants grow on the windowsill, banana bread bakes in the oven, and a purring cat warms my lap. Perhaps that’s just what I need right now.
Or perhaps, that’s when life is at its best.
