It’s the first week of January. Since I found out I was pregnant in December of 2022, this has been my horizon. I prepared to be totally consumed by baby stuff from the beginning of August to the end of the year.
Now that the baby can hold his head up and entertain himself for ten minutes, I have a life to reconfigure. A body with whom to reacquaint myself; a career to rejoin; a social life to rebuild; household and family rhythms to attend to; a church, neighborhood, and city I want to be involved with. And it happens to be January, when every Internet person with whiter teeth than me has just the solution to sell. I’ve just written about weirding time, but already the arbitrary rush to remake myself beckons.
When I first committed to slowing down my life in order to heal with autoimmune disease, I did quit some things. Most drastically, I stopped looking for a full-time job. But I kept things too: ambitious goals and plans for my writing career, most of the housework, the family social calendar, everything about our meals (which, at the time, followed a labor-intensive elimination diet). With all the sleep I needed and a puppy in the house, things could still get hectic.
Eventually I also had to admit, though, that my frenetic pace wasn’t just a result of math that failed to add up. Once I stopped assuming that I had to do it all, I realized I still didn’t really know another way to live. If I didn’t convince myself I was “behind,” I had no idea whether I could motivate myself to do things. If I let self-imposed deadlines slip or ordered takeout, what would happen next?! I relied on a constant, vague-but-very-real sense of imminent catastrophe to power myself through my days.
I faced a decision: if I took a different tack, I actually had no idea what would happen next. But I surveyed the situation and decided that my number one priority really was to quit the daily practice of spiking my own adrenaline and cortisol to unsustainable levels. If that was what it took to not be “behind,” I wasn’t willing to do it anymore. More to the point, if embracing a slower pace was truly my number one priority, there was actually no way to get “behind.”
Ever since then, I’ve had a habit of saying to myself: you are not behind. I’ve been known to say it out loud, to write it on sticky notes and stick them in my planner, and to plaster it across social media. It still surprises me, eight years later, how radical those words sound. They throw a stick in the spokes of the endless loop of never-enough, never-finished, never-rest thoughts that continue to haunt my days. If I stop and reorient my day around the idea that I’m really, truly not behind, it can literally lower my heart rate. I am exactly where I need to be in order to take my next right step. I’m not chasing a boulder down a hill; I can still make choices here.
You can’t get behind on going slow.
You can’t get behind on being kind.
You can’t get behind on growing into yourself.
You can’t get behind on being God’s beloved.
Sometimes I hesitate to say it, though: you—you—are not behind. What do I know of your life? The very reason we feel so inescapably out of sync with our tasks and schedules is because we live in a world where people are punished for failing to discipline their time. When I worked in catering, I couldn’t mosey the long way around the block to my shift whistling a made-up “you are not behind” song. When you’re in school, you lose points for late assignments. When you have a baby, the intervals are few and precious where you have any choice in the next right thing. Sometimes you spend your Saturday night meandering toward the conclusion of an essay that you usually try to send on Thursday. I just learned last week that I’m too old to start a career in air traffic control.
And yet very little that we do will ever be served by the hectic and dread-filled belief that we are behind and urgently need to somehow get ahead. Creativity certainly doesn’t answer that kind of summons. Neither does wisdom or healing. There is no such thing as “making up for lost time.” We always have exactly the time that we have.
Even when something is truly urgent, we may need to lend it our focus, our economy of motion, our clarity and our effort. But it’s not helped by a shame-filled judgment about where we should have been by now, or a fear-laced premonition of terrible future consequences. In the process of moving 200 teenagers and all their equipment around metro Atlanta, my high school marching band director never yelled at anyone to “hurry!!” Instead he would proclaim: “Move with purpose!” We would get where we were going much faster if rushing didn’t cause mistakes, if stress didn’t cause squabbles, if frantic motion didn’t translate into a frantic performance on the field.
“You are not behind” means we can only move forward from this moment now. It means we will marshal our resources more efficiently if we meet a challenge with calm and confidence rather than haste and shame.
If the idea of getting “behind” isn’t strictly logical or actually productive, how have we all come to believe it? It only makes sense to us because we’ve swum in anxiety-producing waters for so long. We’re discipled by unnecessary zero-sum competition where cooperation would do just as well. We unquestioningly expect “failure” to be met with punishment rather than humor, grace, or care. A culture of side hustles and second shifts makes us think that if we’re not behind, we’re not even trying.
And frankly, there are those who benefit from this. A citizenry too stressed out to pay attention is easily manipulated; a workforce too anxious to think is easily controlled; people who are in a hurry buy stuff. To me, there’s a record-scratch, everyone-at-the-party-stop-and-stare quality to the simple statement, “you are not behind.” Maybe it’s because it quietly calls all of that into question.
Here on this January 7, I do believe that no matter how many chores have piled up, no matter what deadlines are passing you by, no matter how late you are to one social justice party or another, you cannot be behind on your own life. Maybe something good and important will indeed pass you by; maybe you can point to things that already have. But we belong to a God of abundance and of creativity, and this God is always making more life and calling it good. This God does not give up on us. This God has never required us to chase down blessing.
This God does not get disappointed and leave us behind.
Her pace is our pace, as long as it takes, the pace of plenty, the pace of grace.
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey
Just read this again. I think you know that I agree completely & have been working on this same thing for quite a while now (though my phrase is, "It's okay to go slow."), but you've said it all so beautifully, Lyndsey. It made me cry.