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Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path by Erin Loechner

You’re here, but you want to be there.

So you spend your life narrowing this divide, and you call this your race, your journey, your path. You live your days tightening your boot straps, wiping the sweat from your brow, chasing undiscovered happiness just around the bend. Higher! Faster! Better! Stronger!

And on and on you run.

Viral sensation and HGTV.com star Erin Loechner knows about the chase. Before turning 30, she’d built a fan base of one million women worldwide and earned the title “The Nicest Girl Online” as she was praised for her authentic voice and effortless style. The New York Times applauded her, her friends and church admired her, and her husband and baby adored her.

She had arrived at the ultimate destination.

So why did she feel so lost?

In Chasing Slow, Erin turns away from fast and fame and frenzy. Follow along as she blazes the trail toward a new-fashioned lifestyle–one that will refresh your perspective, renew your priorities and shift your focus to the journey that matters most. Through a series of steep climbs–her husband’s brain tumor, bankruptcy, family loss, and public criticism–Erin learns just how much strength it takes to surrender it all, and to veer right into grace.

Life’s answers are not always hidden where they seem. It’s time to venture off the beaten path to see that we’ve already been given everything we need. We’ve already arrived.

1) Acknowledge that “busyness” and “more” will never be enough

This is #1 because everything really starts with this “aha!” moment. If you aren’t head nodding to this, you may not yet be open to the remainder of this list. But, if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you have an open mind and are already on board :).

• “Busyness is a byproduct of our culture. It is the sacrifice we make for our religion of more, for our perfectionist tendencies, for our temptation to over schedule, over inform, overprovide.”
• “More, she said, is a never-ending immeasurable. It can’t be counted or valued or summed or justified. More is always, by definition, just ahead at the horizon. That’s why we never stop chasing it. More is never enough.”
• “I know of this quest for more. Women who want it all, who strive to excel in everything, who need to perfect each and every category. We want to wake up with sexy tousled hair, kiss our husband on the lips, walk to an early morning barre class while the baby bounces quietly in our organic carrier, meet our girlfriends for a cold-pressed juice before changing into our power suit and heel-toeing it to the seventeenth-floor office as our eldest, a sophomore — What? You have a sophomore? You look amazing! — earns early entry into Yale and arrives home from his swim meet in time to compliment the free-range egg quiche we just whipped up with herbs from the backyard garden. This cannot be the ideal. This cannot be the standard.”

2) Embrace the tension

By choosing to slow down and intentionally live slowly, you will be going against societal norms. Personally, I find this consistently difficult (and you’ll see in the next point that it’s not always easy) because society seems to have an elasticity that always tries to draw you back into the “normal.”

• “If you choose to slow your life, to live intentionally, to subtract belongings or schedules or expectations — if you tell the truth about yourself to yourself — you will begin to notice tension around you.”
• “In a society that places a disproportionate emphasis on productivity, there is a true and real fear of slowing down. Will we be replaced? Left behind? Disrespected by the masses, whispered about in cubicles? Will we be cast aside for not pulling our weight, for not keeping up with the pace, for not playing by the rules?”
• “I wonder how many of us are trading in our peace, our passions, our pliés in search of something more. How many of us are fighting for the American dream, running the rat race, praying to scale Maslow’s self-actualization pyramid, when really we just want to dance?”

3) The journey is a rollercoaster

Quite simply, it’s not easy to go against the norm. But, it’s worth it. Like any journey, it will have its ups and downs.

• “We can chase more, in the fast lane. We can chase slow. (It’s still a chase.)”
• “When you edit your soul, no one wins.”
• “When we strip away every circumstantial identity — writer, mother, wife — we are left with the only identity that can never be in question: I am a woman of God. Therefore, I am a woman of Love. When we define ourselves as women and men of God or of Love or of Light or of whatever name forces us out of the small role we are playing into the gloriously intricate story woven into this world, our worth is no longer in question…nothing can threaten this truth.”

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4) Set perspective

While there any many ways perspective is covered in Chasing Slow, my favorite learnings are from Erin’s trip to Ethiopia. These should be a daily reminder to set perspective at the beginning of each day.

• “It takes only one visit to a third world country to understand how far I’ve gone off course.”
• “I do not understand what it is like to live in a place where a drink of clean water is not readily available, where education is not accessible, where my basic needs are either not met or fought for with every ounce of my being.”
• “Ask an Ethiopian what they need and they might tell you with a wide smile: amassing is meaningless. There is only today, with holes in our pockets, with time spilling out. We cannot keep it for tomorrow. We cannot mend our seams to hoard, save, carry. Ask a bird how to fly, and it might tell you to remove the weight from your wings.”

5) Create your purpose

Do you know what you want to do with your life? Are you doing it now? We are only here for a short time in the grand scheme of things. The average lifespan today is about 1% of recorded human history. What are you doing with your 1%?

• “Does everyone else know what they’re supposed to be doing?”
• “But I find myself continually searching, exploring, grasping for some level of understanding, for a hint of purpose.”
• “There is something deep within me that seeks meaning, that rejects the idea we’ve been placed here to wander with no purpose, for no reason, for no significance.”

6) You always have a choice

No matter how tough it gets at times, you always have a choice. What’s in your control? Do you hold the key to your own cage?

• “I think of the small choices we make daily. I think of how we can choose to kintsugi our circumstance, of how we can choose to amass or not, of how we can choose to speed up or not.”
• “Never, ever forget that this life offers options.”
• “We often hold the keys to our own cages.”

7) Keep your expectations in check

One of the keys to happiness is lowering (or eliminating) your expectations.

• “We spend our days searching to fill the wide margin between the person we are and the person we want to become.”
• “There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.” (G. K. Chesterton)
• “The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we’d learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did.” (John Green)

8) Express gratitude daily

Don’t just lower expectations and desire less, express gratitude for where you currently are and what you currently have.

• “Gratitude for where you are, not where you hope to be, is the best virtue to practice on your quest for change. You are here, now. You have, thank goodness, been given all that you need for today.”
• “I am pursuing minimalism. I know this to be true. I want less, and I want simplicity, and I want to spend my days connecting and caring, not consuming and completing. But. More important than pursuing minimalism, for me, is pursuing gratitude.”
• “I do not yet realize that, without grace, pursuing the slow life is just as exhausting as pursuing the fast one. Without grace, minimalism is another metric for perfection.”

9) Know when to say “enough” to the online world

Digital addiction is a real thing these days, and the need for digital minimalism is more important than ever.

• “It is named the ‘web’ for good reason.” (David Foster Wallace)
• “Deep breath. Are we all inhaling intoxicating Pinterest fumes? An oxygenated reality? And if so, can we call it true inspiration? The definition of inspiration is the drawing of breath, an inhalation, a gasp. A filling-up that offers an abundance of energy for your day, for the task, for that project, for this life.”
• “X. You know, the X on your web browser? Click on it today. Get offline and get outside. This is my answer to a slower day, each and every time.”

10) Create margin in your life

This is probably one of the best slow living tips once you begin slow living. Creating margin can help your life breath.

• “We have margin. We have space. We have room for ourselves, for others.”
• “It is difficult to be creative, to be forbearing, to persist when you cannot see a margin of time in your calendar. When you have not created space for laughter, for surprise, for ill-timed finger-painting sessions with a condiment-covered dog.”
• “Here is the secret to subtraction. It doesn’t matter what you remove. What matters is that you stop adding it back.”

11) Forget the clock

Always remember the story of the tourist and the fisherman.

• “As soon as we begin watching the calendar, the clock, we miss the adventure.”
• “When I am too focused on the day to see this minute — this very minute — she will miss it.”
• “Big changes take small steps, and sometimes it takes just one thing to change the course of your minute, your day, your life. I believe in the power of one…Often it takes just one small thing, just one small thing that proves not to be small at all.”

12) Leave room for revision

One of my favorite quotes of all time is: “Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece after all.” (Nathan W. Morris).

• “I can now authoritatively tell you that in crossword puzzles and in life, use pencil. Things will need to be erased.”
• “Wisdom is little more than knowing what works for you and forgetting the rest.”
• “All human plans are subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.” (Arthur C. Clarke)

“Keep slowing down. You’ve got a race to lose.”

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