“This is the time to be slow”

And so it begins….Advent. The lead up to Christmas. 

You don’t need me to tell you how different this Christmas is going to be, after what has been the most challenging, unsettling, and destabilising of years. 

How is your soul this week?

What do you most need?

This is the time to be slow. 

I am discovering that I need time to be slow this Advent even more than usual.

These last three months have seen our family learning to live in a very different season. Elder Nearest-and-Dearest has been living away from home at University.

For 18 years I have been directly and daily involved in her life, and for 15 years we have lived and operated as a Four. 

One has stretched her wings and moved away, with a concomitant and fabulous increase in confidence and independence.

We who remain are learning how to be a three and not a four in our day-to-day lives, creating new rhythms and patterns. We are adjusting to sadness at the enormity of the hole left by the piece of the picture who is not here, and are enjoying creating new pictures that are different, fun and allow for expression that would not have happened in the same way before. 

Throughout all this, I have found that my soul has needed much longer to catch up with changing events than I had perhaps anticipated. 

So much has been renegotiated rapidly – mentally, emotionally and physically. And I am learning that it is important to take time to simply stop and be….. not to power up and put on my normal ‘onwards and upwards‘ self but sit amongst my weeds and notice all the emotions that I am experiencing. Because for all the sad feelings of loss and grief, there are also joyful feelings of pride, delight and excited anticipation of all that is to come in this new world of change and independence. 

For me, then, Advent is well timed. I know that

…a little pause…

   …a little stopping to be still and reflect

      …is much needed.

I encourage you to do the same. 

Whatever you find yourself feeling and facing as you approach Christmas, I imagine that a few minutes each day to stop, be quiet with your soul and re-ground yourself in whatever is most important to you will not go amiss. 

A friend recently introduced me to the podcast The Next Right Thing, with Emily P Freeman. It is a beautiful podcast, thoughtful and reflective whilst also being practical and empowering when it comes to making decisions. In a recent podcast, she read out a blessing by the Irish poet John O’Donohue .  His works are beautiful, and speak to a lot of the themes of Advent. 

And so I leave you this week with this beautiful reflection to notice, sit with and chew over:

This is the time to be slow, 

Lie low to the wall

Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart

All sense of yourself

And your hesitant light. 

If you remain generous,

Time will come good;

And you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air will be kind

And blushed with beginning.

John O’Donohue, from ‘To Bless the Space Between Us’, 2008

 

For these next weeks of Advent, I simply offer reflections of John O’Donohue that I hope you can take and breath into and through in stillness and quiet, as a wee gift to yourself.  

Advent…this is the time to be slow.