Why I Stopped Waiting for "When Life Slows Down"

For a long time I kept a list in my head of things I'd get to later.

Not a real list. Nothing written down. Just a quiet running tally of what I'd start taking seriously once things calmed down.

I'd get back to moving my body after lambing. I'd figure out the food thing once the baby was sleeping through. I'd deal with how tired I was once the toddler got a little more independent, once the calendar finally had some breathing room in it.

Lambing season ended. The baby started sleeping better. The calendar has never once had breathing room in it.

That's why I stopped waiting for "when life slows down." Not because things got easier. Because they didn't, and I finally just accepted that they weren't ever going to.

Why I Stopped Waiting for "When Life Slows Down" — The Season You're Waiting For Isn't Coming

Here's what kept happening, and I'd bet money it's happened to you too.

I'd move the deadline, then something else would fill the space I'd been saving, so I'd move it again and tell myself the same thing I'd told myself the month before.

That's the loop.

And it doesn't break on its own, it just keeps rolling forward with your name on it.

So let me say the thing I wish somebody had told me a whole lot sooner: you don't have to wait for it!

You're Scheduling Yourself Into Next Year

You're not putting yourself off because you don't care about yourself.

You're doing it because every other thing on your list has a time attached to it and you don't.

The barn has a timeline.

The kids have a timeline.

The work has a timeline.

You are the only thing on that whole list that can quietly slide to tomorrow without a single person noticing, so you slide, and slide..... (And you would never in a million years let somebody else do that to themselves!)

And your body doesn't file that away politely and wait for you to come back to it, it just keeps running on less, and you feel it as foggy afternoons and a fuse that's shorter than you want around the people you love most.

That's not you being dramatic. That's the bill coming due.

There's Busy That Ends, and There's Busy That's Just Your Life

The busy that ends has a date attached.

A big project, tax season, the last two weeks of school. You white-knuckle it, it's over, you recover, and that system works fine!

Then there's the other kind.

Two little kids. A farm. Animals that need checking whether or not you slept. A business you're building in the cracks of your time. A marriage. That kind doesn't end, it just changes shape on you.

I spent years treating the second kind like the first kind. That's the whole mistake, and it is such an easy one to make. (I'd love to tell you I caught it early.)

You cannot white-knuckle a life. You can only white-knuckle a stretch of one.

You Keep Putting Yourself at the Bottom of a List That Never Ends

Here's the part that surprised me.

I assumed taking care of myself in a season like this would cost more time than I had. It cost almost none! What it cost was deciding it wasn't OPTIONAL.

Some days that looks like ten minutes of movement.

Some days it's water before anything else.

Some days it's genuinely just eating something before 2pm (truly revolutionary work happening over here! 😵‍💫).

None of that is impressive. Nothing about it would look like progress to anybody watching. But it's the difference between running the season and getting run by it.

This is the only body I get for every season God puts me in, and postponing it has never once made a single one of those seasons easier.

What Actually Helped Me

Nobody clapped. There was no morning where I woke up brand new, and I didn't tell a single person I was doing anything differently, because there was nothing to tell.

What changed is that I picked the handful of things that take under five minutes, and I stopped negotiating with them. That's it. That's the entire strategy! I made a decision.

I also had to get honest about what I was reaching for at 5:30 in the morning. I've never been a traditional coffee drinker, so I can't sit here and tell you I know how hard a four-cups-a-day habit is to untangle (I had my own thing I leaned on, so I am absolutely not throwing stones!). Reaching for something isn't the problem. I wanted something steady I could take before the house got loud and not pay for by mid-afternoon.

For me that's been Rush. It's designed to support steady energy, I take it in the morning before the day gets away from me, and it's the one thing that hasn't fallen off in the seasons when everything else absolutely did!

Sure, it isn't doing the hard part. I'm still the one getting up at 5:30am (with of course my toddler by my side) and I still have to go do the day. But it makes that first hour a whole lot friendlier.

And if you're curious about it, ask me! I would so much rather answer a question than have somebody order something they weren't sure about.

Your Turn

I still catch myself doing it.

I heard myself say a couple weeks ago that I'd get serious about all of this after the fall farm projects got done, and then I laughed out loud, because I have been saying some version of that sentence for years!

Waiting is a hard habit to break, and I'm not writing this from the other side of anything. I'm writing it from the middle.

But capacity over calendar. Every single time.

You're not failing at balance. You're waiting on a season that was never going to hold still, and you don't need it to hold still to start.

So what's the thing you've been saving for when life slows down? Tell me, I would love to hear it! 💗

Love,

Breanna