When does productivity bleed into alienation? How do we resist the pressures to constantly be doing? What is the toll that this pressure takes on our minds and bodies? And how might our psyches change when paired instead with the rhythmic sway of trees or the crackle of a flame?
Please, somebody tell me, when did we all get so damn busy?
I’m struggling to write this week. I returned from Mexico after leading a rewarding psilocybin retreat, yet barely slept. Back in Portland, I hit the ground running and kicked off the third cohort of Inner Trek last weekend - the leading psilocybin facilitator training program here in Oregon, where I serve as a lead educator. I also returned to a full week of clients, and a 1:1 psychedelic journey I facilitated.
This week, I don’t have any mythopoetic wonderings or explorations into depth psychology or useful tips for writing.
Because I’m exhausted. And I’m guessing you are too.
Listen: the last thing I want to do here is whine about how tired I am. Poor me, flying to Mexico to serve people psychedelics and then come home to a career that my 18 year old self would die for. I get it. I’m just being real with you.
Everyone I know is busy. For older readers, let me ask: thirty years ago, did you have to schedule with your friends simply to have a phone call? Did you have to plan three weeks in advance to have dinner? Did you feel as if you were constantly playing catch up, or felt the gnawing pressure to ”post everyday”? Is time really speeding up, or does that just happen to us all?
Maybe some of you reading this are living rare lives of ceremonial richness close to mountains, embedded in a community of loved ones and organic food. Maybe you’ve heeded the increasingly prescient words of techno-philosopher Jeron Lanier and deleted social media entirely. Maybe you’ve thrown the iphone in the trash, and now take five minutes to send a text message on a flip phone. Maybe you don’t have a phone, and live like a Scottish Jacobite farmer.
If that’s the case, bless you. I’m just not there yet. But I want to be. I want to slow down, and I have a sense that I am not alone in that desire.
The other day I was talking to a friend about the early days of the pandemic, March and April of 2020. I was fresh out of grad school, starting my private practice, and reveling in the enforced post-degree break from society. These were the days when flocks of optimistic people would head out their doors at 6pm. and in unison bang their pots and pans together, creating this beautiful cacophony of celebration amidst the apocalyptic feeling of the lockdown. Initially this began to thank the healthcare workers who were risking their lives to treat Covid patients. But eventually it turned into an evening ritual of isolated celebration and camaraderie that I wish would spread, like the Covid virus, across the world once again.
For that short period of time, I felt myself in a silent village that would come together for a rare moment of connection in a time of unfathomable loss. The evening uproar of clanking pots, night after night, became a predictable marker in days that seemed to meld together in a dissociated miasma of confusion. The clanking became my clocktower, a great bell tolling for all to hear, linking me with hundreds of others in a moment of collective effervescence and slow time.
It reminded me of being in the Middle East, where the Adhan, or the call to prayer, would ring out five times a day from mosques across the city. For just a moment, the over-caffeinated, car-horn tumult of a city like Cairo would pause and take a breath. A simple reminder for everyone to slow down, and for just a moment, remember the divine.
I won’t lie: early Covid was good to me. I had all the time in the world to read, to host online myth circles and men’s groups, to focus on my clients, to write. While I knew several people who died from covid, I was lucky enough to not have that particular demon darken my door. I actually have a particular flavor of nostalgia for that time, strange as that sounds.
When Covid hit, It was the first time in my adult life that I felt the incessant demands of capitalism and productivity wane. Those warm spring evenings I would sit with the door open, listen to the eerie silence of a shuttered city, and feel completely permissioned to simply read a book, undisturbed. Can you imagine?
Don’t get me wrong: I have no desire to relive that horrific period of time. Only a few months later my entire life crumbled as my then-partner suddenly left town. I’m glad it's well behind us all. But it offered me a glimpse into a way of being that felt decidedly different from the lifestyle I now find myself immersed in, which is becoming increasingly untenable.
I recently had an experience in my professional community that required me to face the limits of my capacity. After agreeing to take on one-too-many projects, I let a friend of mine down, and left his business in a difficult spot. I don’t feel good about it.
And it served as a necessary reckoning that forced me to admit to myself that I am simply at my limit. Not quite burned out. But courting the “goddess of limit,” as Martin Shaw says.
So, this week, all I have to offer is this prayer for slowness. I don’t have any answers. I am deep in the jungle with this one, hacking my way through, trying to find a path. But I have a sense that I am not alone either. Rather, this is the collective situation of our times. Call it late-stage capitalism. Call it increasingly out of control technologies and vampiric algorithms that feed on attention. Call it wealth inequality. Call it the anthropocene. Whatever its name, the point is that we are in this thing together.
Maybe sometime soon we’ll find each other in a distant clearing and build a fire. That’s when the best stories are told, after all.
More and more people I know are craving a life of slowness, a community of connectedness, and a way of living that adheres to a human pace. After having our minds thoroughly flayed by social media, I think all of us are trying to figure out what that pace feels like once again.
Like I said, I don’t have any answers here. Just a set of feelings and sensations that I am beginning to try and orient my life towards. It feels unknown and scary. It feels like a fateful move upstream, both exciting and foreboding, what I imagine the salmon feels when it turns its body back in the direction of the wide river mouth from whence it came.
And like the salmon, all I have is this magnetic intuition guiding me home.
My book, Psychedelics and the Soul: A Mythic Guide to Psychedelic Healing, Depth Psychology, and Cultural Repair, is now available for pre-order! Get your copy here or through my favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s Books.
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This resonates, brother. I could say plenty, but I won't, other than this: 'slow' and 'down' are soul words. Oh, and the etymological root of the word 'busy' is 'anxious'. How odd that many wear it like a badge of honour: "I'm so busy!"
Loved this relatable post Simon. I signed up for a yearlong poetic medicine class just before Covid. It was such a treat to have the time and space to listen to the wind, birds and squirrels and reflect in ways that weren’t available before. Since then things have ramped up and last nights dream found me in a crowded office trying to get my space - moving through the building and coming to a dark place where I was fighting to see so hard that I ended up in a place I didn’t want to be. All of this to say, I ‘m getting the message that I need to sit in the dark and listen to its wisdom, so contrary to the cultural zeitgeist. Thank you!