Articles 8.
8.1
Sheltered & Held - Slowdown Farmstead
“
For washing our floors, I use Castile soap of two different types. I buy jugs of “black soap”, a traditional soap from France that can be used for almost any cleaning job in the home. It’s marvellous stuff and I’m quite addicted to the scent. For my traditional “soaped” floors in the kitchen, I use a Castile soap from Denmark that has a natural white tint to it. When we renovated our kitchen, we opted for raw plank, white oak floors. I decided not to put a plastic finish on them (varnish), but instead use the traditional technique of applying lye and then concentrated Castile soap to create a finish that builds up a protective layer naturally. It’s more upkeep than a urethane finish would be, but that’s okay, too.
…
For indoor paint we will only use lime or chalk based, naturally tinted paints, My latest favourite is “Pure and Original” paints out of Belgium. There is something quite warming about their paints. They’re dimensional and slightly textured in a way that plastic paints just can’t be. Additionally, and more importantly maybe, is that these paints reduce mould growth because of their lime content. I want a house that breathes
….
So the paint. Or, maybe the finish entirely. We had our walls plastered with traditional lime plaster in the kitchen and our bathroom shower built of tadelakt. Tadelakt is a traditional Moroccan plastering technique that creates a finish that is not susceptible to mould like our traditional tile and mortar showers are. And, it’s absolutely gorgeous. We hired someone to do it and after watching him and his team take three weeks of intense manual labour to complete it, I’m glad we did. It’s not for the faint of heart and there is a lot of skill that goes into it. I wouldn’t recommend tackling that one on your own.
…
I’m sure you can surmise by my position on everything else that I am not on board with this new spyware, er I mean “smart house technology”. No thanks. Give me a dumb house, please. One that doesn’t report back to anyone or dumb me down even further. Our world is not absent ease and comfort, our world is overloaded with it. We need to use our brains and be challenged and to do so, we need to be surrounded with those challenges. Nobody needs a fridge to send their grocery list to the manufacturer to sell to the advertisers to then deliver to their phone while filling their homes with ever-more EMF static. Make a list or, hey, use your memory even! Radical stuff, I know.
”
8.2
Dancing in the Fray - Slowdown Farmstead
“As we expand our fruit orchard and garden this year, the normal call of growing our own food turns into a roar. “Much to do! Much to do!” We are two, trying to do. Trying to do with grace and care. That’s the difference. There was a time when we would put our heads down, throw ourselves at whatever came our way, and heave and ho and “git ‘er dun”! No more. We decided that - no more.
What does that look like? It looks like a different world. It looks softer and more considered. It looks like mornings working out together, outside under the sun. It means stopping for a kiss in the middle of shovelling. It means sitting on a log to share a story while we sip a cold drink. It’s a butt pat on breaks, a dance in the fields, a joint marvelling at a dragonfly or unknown birdsong. It means doing more projects together instead of our tried and true, “divide and conquer”. It means stopping mid-afternoon to sit in the cold plunge tub together, sharing gasped breaths and goosebumps. It means sunning our buns because it’s important and other things can wait. That’s what the divergence has been for us - other things can wait, but we can’t.
…
When our kids were young, I had the good fortune of knowing someone that became a sort of parenting mentor for me. She told me that marriage had to trump children. I don’t think parents think that way much anymore. It seems like most couples pour their entire lives into their children and put their relationships on the back burner. It happens naturally enough, but all the more reason to squirrel away some of yourselves. Even then, when there was military schedules and three little kids, we built lives that fed our relationship. Our kids went to bed on a schedule. They had naps on a schedule. They were perky and chipper most of the time because they weren’t chronically exhausted. And we, too, were perky and chipper most of the time, because we weren’t chronically exhausted either.
Sometimes, those two hours in the evening, after the kids went to sleep, were the only time we had together alone. We didn’t have babysitters or family around. It was just us and a lot of time, just me alone. Those couple of hours often found us sitting on the front stoop of our military house, sharing a beer and quiet space. Or maybe we would read together in bed or do a workout in our backyard. A little walk around the back woods or a massage for one or the other. It didn’t matter, but what did was just being a man and woman together, not mom and dad, just us remembering each other.
I’m sharing about those early years to illustrate that there doesn’t come a time when your marriage will suddenly birth the moment when you will be connected in a deeply meaningful way. There is no circumstance that will finally appear when you will finally be able to dedicate the time to each other. You will do it now or you will not do it later. You can’t buy time. You can put things off, but don’t be fooled into thinking that all is well. Like all and everything, it’s a decision and then it’s action. Daily. “
8.3
Hugging the X-Axis - David Perell
“As my priorities have shifted, I’ve discovered a tradeoff between the shine of novelty and the consistency of commitment. Western culture over-indexes on novelty. It suffers from commitment phobia. I see this in our culture of digital nomadism, job-hopping among yuppies, and listening to books at 3x speed instead of reading them deeply. Anxiety is the driving force behind this game of hopscotch.
The problem is that a life without commitment is a life spent hugging the X-Axis.
…
They’re scared of trapping themselves in an intellectual box that’ll constrict their identity. But in that fear, they’re underestimating the depth of expertise and the range of opportunities available to people with a reputation for excellence in a particular area. (One of my students, Ana Lorena Fabrega comes to mind — she’s become one of the most influential minds in childhood education because she’s so committed to it). And besides, people with Personal Monopolies choose their own limitations. What looks narrow to another person ends up feeling expansive to them. Through commitment, they step off the X-Axis and unlock a new world of potential.
…
Because they have cause and effect backward. In Orthodoxy, G.K Chesterton writes: “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”
To illustrate the point, Chesterton distinguishes between the optimist and the patriot. The optimist loves their country because it’s on an upward trajectory, while the patriot loves something simply because it’s worthy of their love — and the trajectory is irrelevant. Being an optimist is easy. Being a patriot is hard. But with patriotism comes wisdom. Patriots know things can be worth caring for even when they’re imperfect. Often, their love expands in moments of difficulty. Think of the mother who kisses her son’s bleeding finger or the citizen who sees the brokenness of their country and runs for political office. A world without patriots is a world without perseverance, and when there’s no perseverance, there’s no meaning. ”
8.4
The Small Steps of Giant Leaps - Shane Parrish
“One of the most beneficial skills you can learn in life is how to consistently put yourself in a good position. The person who finds themselves in a strong position can take advantage of circumstances while others are forced into a series of poor choices.
…
A lack of consistency keeps ordinary people from extraordinary results. It’s like we’re Sisyphus rolling a boulder halfway up the hill, only to throw our hands in the air and go home. When we show up the next day, we see the boulder at the bottom of the hill. Not only did this undermine our progress but it makes getting started even harder.
Excelling at the small choices that compound over time perpetually leaves you in favorable circumstances. No matter what happens in the world, you’re never in a position where you are forced into a bad decision.”
8.5
Feeding Kids - Slowdown Farmstead
“What I want to address here is the psychology of feeding your kids. The real, genuine issue around meal times and food fights. We like to put band-aids on these issues. Glossy magazines and perky “influencers” will show you how to hide nutrition in a cupcake or how to navigate a kid that refuses to eat, or things you can do to make food more “fun”. That’s not real. And if you’re still trapped in that world, please, stop feeling like a failure. There are no answers there. Not really. Not if you want your child to be well nourished and familiar with real, wholesome foods.
So, who am I to dole out feeding kid advice? No one, really. I was a practicing nutritionist, yes, but that holds zero sway with a kid. But as a woman now in my fifties, I can say that I’m grateful and proud of the effort (and pain at times) we went to in prioritizing the health of our children. And it’s nice that they are effusive in their appreciation of our efforts as well. They grew up to appreciate robust, complex flavours and continue to pursue health. Not because we stood over them with iron fists, but because they genuinely loved what we ate. I have a hard time thinking of a single food our kids were (or are now) fussy with. And when I say that, I should clarify that what we ate was all sorts of hearty stews, bone broth based soups, patés and organ meats, stuffed beef heart and drippy, sticky oxtail. The weird stuff. They loved it all. But the real proof in the pudding is that our kids grew into adults that continue to source and eat real, nourishing foods. It’s an absolute delight (and relief) for us to see our eldest daughter, now just six weeks away from having her first child, nourishing herself, her husband, and that developing little babe on the most nutrient dense food available. “
8.6
Let Go of the Learning Baggage - Farnam Street
“We are trained by our modern world to organize our day into mutually exclusive chunks called ‘work’, ‘play’, and ‘sleep’. One is done at the office, the other two are not. We are not allowed to move fluidly between these chunks, or combine them in our 24 hour day. Lyndon Johnson got to nap at the office in the afternoon, likely because he was President and didn’t have to worry about what his boss was going to think. Most of us don’t have this option. And now in the open office debacle we can’t even have a quiet 10 minutes of rest in our cubicles.
We have become trained to equate working with doing. Thus the ‘doing’ has value. We deserve to get paid for this. And, it seems, only this.
…
Can we change how we approach learning, letting go of the guilt associated with not being visibly active, and embrace what seems counter-intuitive?
Thinking and talking are useful elements of learning. And what we learn in our ‘play’ time can be valuable to our ‘work’ time, and there’s nothing wrong with moving between the two (or combining them) during our day.”