The slow life

This time last year, I was hoping for something big to happen. I wanted a shakeup in my life. I was feeling stalled at work and I had been living in an old dusty house for over three years. I had a sudden energy to travel somewhere far and wide and do some crazy things. And all of that happened. I got a new job later in the year, I moved to a nicer place in the city, and I got to travel to South Africa, Turkey, and Japan. This time around, I’ve been thinking a good while about what I really want from 2019. And it’s come down to just living the simple life focusing on the self.

I want to take things more deliberately and slower this year. The past few years have felt like a rapidfire series of events where I never properly had the chance to process anything or act with intent to everything that was happening to me. I was so focused on learning, growing, and hustling that I often forgot to take care of myself. That meant personal health, mental health, and taking time for myself. I jumped at every chance to try something new at work, to travel to faraway places that I never will have the chance to go to again, and to maximize my time on side projects while partaking in the gig economy as needed. This overload of activity has certainly gotten overwhelming, and it’s time I started tackling how I spend my time with a bit more thought.

When I set my own personal goals for this year, they were simple. Exercise more. Spend more time making art. Read more books. Work on quicker and shorter side projects. Eat healthier food. Get more sleep. Engage more with the people closest to me. Play more narratively-driven indie experiences. There was nothing crazy in here about making a drastic life change or spending a month in a foreign country. I think I’m getting to that sweet age where I’m starting to appreciate the little things and deliberately spend more time doing them, going as far as carving out time in my calendar for all things I mentioned above.

Thinking back to how I spent my time a decade ago when I was still in high school, this was exactly it. I used to draw endlessly for hours or spend an entire afternoon just tinkering with random brushes in Photoshop. I would devour dystopian sci-fi books like a madman and play all kinds of short indie games with unique mechanics and innovative ideas. All of this stopped happening due to the chaos of college and the all-consuming nature of holding a full time job. But now that I’m in my late twenties and things are starting to calm down a bit, I want to get back to the things that I obsessed over in my late teens.

I’ve started making more art and it has made me a lot happier. Focusing on lineart and perfecting the hues in a pencil sketch puts me in such a good state of flow that I’ve desperately missed over the past few years. I’ve been regularly working out twice a week and it has made a big difference in my every day posture, flexibility, and overall physique. I used to kickbox and grapple regularly around eight years ago, so practicing those moves again and feeling those aged muscles again has been good. Also been eating a lot healthier, sticking to a lot more fruits & veggies and a lot less meat. I’m currently halfway through Sapiens and The Messy Middle, both great non-fiction books that have opened me up to a new way of looking at the world. This has been a good start so far for those 2019 goals, and I’m hoping to keep them going consistently for the rest of the year.

Overall, it definitely feels different than the year before. I want things to happen slowly and I want to take my time with it. I want to savor the things I enjoy and take care of my mental health. I tend to be the type of person who needs a lot of downtime after a particularly interaction heavy or mentally stimulating day, so I’m going to start taking a few hours every day (and even entire weekends) where I do absolutely nothing and just chill out. I’ve been micro-managing my evenings almost every day for the past two years in order to maximize my efficiency, so it’s going to be nice to have absolutely nothing to do once in a while.

So yeah, it’s all about the slow life in 2019. Being in your late twenties is a strange time. You start gaining a new perspective on what really matters to you and your self-confidence gets even stronger. You know who you are by now and aren’t bothered by what your peers think of how you spend your time or what you do when you’re not at work. You start to embrace the things you once loved and fall back into the things that you used to enjoy. It’s going to be a good year, and I’m looking forward to it.