You are not a machine.

Humans aren't machines.

Artists aren't art factories.

Parents aren't child rearing robots.

But often we bow to the pressure of a society that seems to think we should be.

Do more, be more, get better, fit more in, set some goals, achieve them, set some more… now do the thought experiment - can you hit your ten year goals in six months? Do you feel as tired reading this as I do writing it? We're not ingenious contraptions meant for perpetual expansion.

You might be excused for thinking otherwise, with the proliferation of productivity hacks out there enticing you to work smarter so you can do more in less time, buy this planner and it will give you an extra day a week, optimise your morning routine to set yourself up for a day that will be the most productive day in the history of days; your to do list will be a sea of ticks before lunchtime but don't get too comfortable, there's always more to be done.

I need a rest right now, thinking about all of this.

***

Okay I'm back now. That was a nice rest. I made a cup of tea, and read a few pages in a book about writing fiction that I'm slowly making my way through, not because I feel I should, but because it interests me. Stared out the window for a bit.

***

So. All this busyness. What's the antidote?

Well, there's no one right way to unwind this endless forward agitation. And it's swimming against the stream against a lifetime of being told to swim with it, so it's not going to unwind all in one go. And that's kind of nice, once you get past the desire to be there already, wherever 'there' happens to be - that kind of thinking is more of the same. Unwinding could be slow, could be dreamy, could be something to savour…

Here are a few things that are working for me on my own slow, dreamy unwinding journey:

• Talk to trees. If you're saying hello to your surroundings, and listening for their replies, you're going to be a bit more present here and now. It's harder to be worried about what's next on the list when you're telling a tree its leaves are looking particularly shiny today.
  

• No computer after 9pm, even for entertainment. For me, and for many humans, transition times are more important than we realise. And it's important to give them the time and space they need (they tend to keep their own timelines). So creating a slow slide from writing, which is what I'm usually doing in the evenings, towards bed, helps my whole being feel more ready and helps my rest feel more restful.
  

• Orient inwards - listening more and more to my body's signals about what it needs and prioritising that - with grace, where I can - over the external demands of the world. If you're trying this, your body might say 'rest' for a long time. And your mind might say 'I rested already, come on, get up' and your body might say 'more rest'. And that can be hard. Lives to live, things to do! But rest, and rest more, and rest even more. Humans are seasonal creatures. After a season of rest (sometimes a long, long season of rest, if we're very very overdue), spring will come and we'll start to feel the faint stirrings of a natural internal impulse to move, rather than a caffeine fuelled external demand that we do so.
  

• Daydream. I recently sort-of quit social media - I still post on it because it's like a journal of what I've been doing and thinking that sometimes I like to look back through - but I don't lose time scrolling any more. And I've been noticing a huge difference. I feel more real. The world feels more real. There's more time in between moments - time that would have been filled by reaching for my phone. And in that time, I daydream. I had help letting go of the shiny dopamine inducing feeds of other people's lives - I bought an app called Minimalist Phone which is very effective. It works by making your phone extremely boring so that you don't want to look at it, and it was worth every dollar.

There are many other small ways that I'm finding to let myself be a human and not an endless doing machine, but those are a few. If you're on that journey, or thinking of starting it, it's good to know that it can be scary to orient away from endless busyness. If I'm not spending all my time striving to live up to some external ideal of what a successful human is… then who am I? What do I do? How do I be?

It's like a trust fall into yourself.

How will you know you'll be there to catch yourself if you're falling?

You might have guessed where this is going - what your mission for the week might be. It'll be a gentle first step - this stuff isn't something you put on a to do list and tick off tomorrow. It's a gradual unwinding into a slower, kinder way of being. Recognising, remembering that human animals aren't machines. That we're seasonal, that we're a bit messy, a bit chaotic, a bit full of mystery, worth giving over to wonder.

So your mission for the week is to pick one thing to be curious about, and to be curious about it like a child. Go for a walk and touch things. Watch the clouds and find creatures in them. Daydream, and see if your dreaming mind offers you the first in a trail of breadcrumbs to follow to somewhere unknown.

Is there a little, impractical, unproductive longing that you've been ignoring a while? Take it out, look at it. Think about what kind of life might accommodate it.

All these suggestions are meant to feel dreamy and perhaps a little abstract. The opposite of 'a thing to do'. The beginning of a way to be.

And in that spirit, my own body is wanting to slide into a season of quiet. Of less doing, less output - I've been on a creative high for a while, and I've been pushing it because it's fun to ride that wave of inspiration, fun to create. But underneath the fun there's a growing weariness, and so it's time to take my own advice and slow down for a bit, until I feel that internal stirring that says winter is over and spring might be coming…

So I'll write another blog in a month, rather than next week :) 

I hope it's a month of wonders, for both of us.