Hearthside 05 Slowing Down Gave Me More Life To Live

Hurry feels normal until you realize how much it costs. I used to live slightly ahead of myself, chasing the next task, the next goal, the next version of “caught up.” I got busy, but I did not always get happy, and I was not always fully there for the moments that mattered. Slowing down took time to learn, and it turned out to be one of the hardest and most valuable lessons cabin life has taught me.

I am not talking about laziness or doing nothing. I mean doing less on purpose and doing it with your full attention. When I split wood slowly, I do it better and safer. When I eat without multitasking, the meal becomes a meal again. When I stop sprinting through a day, I actually notice the light through the trees, the sound of the river, and the people right in front of me. That is what mindfulness and slow living look like in real life: presence you can feel, and memories you can keep.

Living close to nature makes the point unavoidable. Wood seasons when it is ready, gardens grow in their own quiet increments, and storms decide when you can travel. The land cannot be hurried, and over time it retrains you to match its rhythm. If you have been feeling burned out, scattered, or like your days blur together, this is an honest reset and a practical reminder that there was never really anywhere to get to besides the life you are already in.

Subscribe for more Hearthside reflections, share this with someone who needs a slower day, and leave a review with one small moment you are going to stop rushing past.

Transcript

Choosing To Slow Down

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Morning everybody. I move slower today than I would have a decade ago. I got less done. I am more at peace than I have been in years, and I no longer think those things are unrelated. Somewhere along the way out here I learned to slow down on purpose, and it turned out to be one of the harder and the more valuable things this life has ever taught me. Welcome to the cabin, where we unplug, unwind, and reconnect. I'm Sean James, and this is my self-reliance, and this is the hearth side. So this one is about slowing down, about doing less on purpose in a world that measures everything by how much they do. Because I think the hurry most of us live in is costing us more than we know, and I want to make the quiet case for the opposite, for living the opposite way. Learning to slow down. For most of my life, I've been in a hurry. So I probably would not have called it that at the time. Would have called it being driven, being ambitious, getting things done, climbing

The Hidden Cost Of Hurry

SPEAKER_00 1:05

the corporate ladder, you know, trying to keep up with the Jones. I rushed through my days chasing the next thing and then the next, always slightly ahead of myself, never quite where I actually was. And it did not make me happy in itself, though it did make me busy, and for a long time I could not not tell the difference between the two. And that's not how I defined my life and still don't. My family and putting aside family time has always been top priority for me. But um probably even during times that I'm with my family, I'm sure my mind was and probably still is to some degree, chasing that next thing. So to be in that moment is um something I've gotten better and better at it as I've gotten older and as I've slowed my life down. The hurry felt necessary though at that time. The way it feels necessary to almost everyone, I think. Like slowing down would mean falling behind or losing or failing. But I was so busy getting the next moment that I that I was never in the one I was in, or not not often enough, unless, you know, the the times that I was building camping or canoeing or fishing, especially solo, would be the times that I was fully, truly in that moment, but I think a lot of the uh rest of the time I was not. Life lives that way where you're never in the moment, is a life mostly missed. It's hard to retain those moments, even in your memory, if you didn't imprint them at the time, really appreciate what you were doing at that time, and really think about it, and like I said, embed it in your psyche and in your memory. You're always leaning forward into a future that arrives and it immediately becomes another thing already past. Of course, I lived a lot of a lot of my years that way before I understood what they'd

Slowness As Focused Work

SPEAKER_00 3:02

cost me. Slowing down the way I mean it here is not laziness, and it's the first thing people get wrong about it, I think. Not doing nothing, it's doing less and doing it with your full attention, which is a completely different thing. When I split wood slowly and deliberately, split it better and safer than when I rush and safer. I'm actually present for it rather than already thinking about the next chore. Slowness is not the absence of work, it's the presence of attention. And things like firewood processing might be one of the most meditative things a man can do. Get that testosterone rush of doing something difficult and um explosive. Yet it's uh something you can just focus on and look for that next uh crack in the wood or the grain and uh aim for that to take your full attention and uh it stops you from thinking of other things. Most of the value in slowing down is exactly that, the return of attention, the ability to actually be in your own life while it's happening rather than racing through it towards some finish line that doesn't actually really exist. And I think the older you get, the more you realize that there's no finish line. When you're young, you think, oh, when I'm 50, this will be the way it is. I'll be old, first of all, and then 60, and then old become 70 and 80 and 90. And it's still you still feel the same, like the same person. You don't feel like you would, you know, you're suddenly an 80-year-old and you identify that way. And honestly, hurry is a way of not being present, and presence is most of what makes a life feel like a life. When I slowed down, I did not get less life. I got more of it because I finally was there for the parts that used to rush past without seeing. Every moment that you think about and focus on, be intentional about, adds up into a lot of memories that you can create in one day when you've embedded and printed those. So especially uh the good times, obviously, in those days, if you really really think about them and embed them, then

Making Memories By Being Present

SPEAKER_00 5:25

you it seems like a longer day and a slower life and a more fulfilling and rewarding life. And here's what I think hurry action costs, and obviously it's more than efficiency. It costs you the meal you eat standing up while already thinking about the next thing, the conversation you were only half present for, and the ordinary beauty of an ordinary day, the light through the trees and sound of the river, the company of the people around you, all but blurred by the speed you're moving through it. So hurry doesn't just make you tired, it makes you absent from your life. Stop and smell the roses, as they say. The strange thing is that all that hurry does not even buy you much. I got no more of the things that actually matter for all of my rushing. I lost a great deal of the experiences in my own life in the bargain. Where sold hurry is a price of success, I think. But I've come to think it's mostly just the price of missing everything, paid a day at a time, till the years are gone, and you can barely remember having lived them. One day blurs into the next. It doesn't have to be that way. Being present and making a point of doing something interesting, something different every day, rather than just focused on getting that big

Nature Sets The Real Pace

SPEAKER_00 6:45

task done or working on your business or whatever it is that you're that you're really focused on and then forgetting about everything else. Land and the lifestyle has taught me to slow down more than any decision I made because the land is not hurry and it will not be hurried. The wood seasons on its own schedule. When you try to rush that, you end up with a sizzling, boiling piece of wood in your fireplace, and it's not very effective, doesn't do a good job. Just having that patience to let it season properly is the right way to do it. The garden grows at its own pace. I'm out there looking at the plants every day, and I was like, I don't even see a change from one day to the next often. But then a week or two or a month or three months down the road, it's a big, abundant producing plant. And the seasons turn when they turn. None of it responds to my impatience in the slightest. Living close to that year after year slowly retrained me till I stopped fighting the pace of things, started matching it, and a great deal of my hurry simply fell away on its own. You know, there really is a rhythm to life. Live close to nature that is fundamentally unhurried, except by daylight and weather and season rather than by a clock in a calendar. Settling into that rhythm was like exhaling from me after holding my breath for years. I didn't have to force myself to slow down in the end. It just had to stop forcing myself to speed up and let the natural pace of this place do the rest, which it did patiently, the way it does everything. Nature is that way. You learn this lesson the more you spend outside and you realize like that when that storm's coming, for example, or if you're out like I am on a canoe trip and you've scheduled, say, five days for that, and you finish your portage from one lake to the next, you get to that lake and the wind is blowing and the waves are big. There's no rush in that. You can't take a chance and go out on that water until it dies down, and it could be ten minutes from now or it could be three hours from now. And either way, you just have to sit there and accept that and modify your schedule accordingly to do it safely and comfortably, and you learn to enjoy those moments. So this is the quiet case for doing less from someone who spent half a life doing, more than half a life doing

Doing Less And Living More

SPEAKER_00 9:18

too much and often missing a lot of it. So slow down, do less and be more present for it. Let that meal be a meal and the evening be an evening, and the ordinary day be the ordinary miracle it actually is. You won't fall behind because there was never really anywhere to get to, and you'll discover that again as you get older, too, that um it's going to be there whether you rush it or not. And really getting to this destination that we all seem to have in mind is never what we think it's going to be. It's actually the journey that that we need and that we need to appreciate. Won't fall behind because there was never really anywhere to get to, only this life you're in right now, which is worth slowing down enough to actually live. So thank you. Appreciate you spending some time with me around the hearth side. I'm gonna try to relax today a little bit more hot day, and day that um doesn't demand much of my time. Um I am slowing down, I'm learning to slow down, I'm producing um less doing more things without a camera, I guess, with me, and trying to um share that with the people that really want to see what I'm doing and to spend that time with me. So thank you for being those people. Appreciate it. I'll see you at the cabin next time. Take care.