Chasing Slow

My mom bought a book for my older sister, asking me to give it to her when I see her in two weeks. Intrigued by the title, I sat down to read it and it was the best decision I’ve made all week.

I have to start by saying that Erin Loechner is an amazing writer. Her words flow together so nicely, technically speaking it was a really easy book to read. I guess I found her writing style to be similar to the way I think, casual but eloquent. I can only hope my own writing will one day be as smooth as that… Anyway. Ranting about how the words are strung together aside, the words themselves hold an important message.

The title of the book, Chasing Slow, might just be two words, but it is the perfect description of what the book is about. Erin describes her own journey to embracing a life of less, a slower, more meaningful lifestyle. She uses her own experiences to illustrate the importance of letting go of control and allowing life to just happen.

Erin implores her readers to discard the calculating, mathematical control that we think we have over our lives, and instead embrace a life of slower pace, less distractions, and more life. She writes of her own experience discarding some of the “rules” that we adopt, defining what’s normal, and how it instantly transformed her lifestyle into something much more meaningful. She paints a picture of a lifestyle that many of us long for, but fear is unattainable.

The truth is, anyone can slow down and live with less. Actually, it’s when you slow down that you actually start living. Learning to break the rules and remembering that life is for living rather than just existing is not easy at all. But when I look back on my life in twenty, thirty or forty years I don’t want to remember a life where I’ve overcommitted to countless things that I have no passion for. I want to remember spontaneous road trips, playing cards at a dinner table on display in an isolated corner of Sears Home, and walking in the rain without an umbrella.

I see Chasing Slow as a challenge, a call to live the fullest, most authentic version of my life. The key to this, or so it seems, is realizing that all I need is right in front of me, and everything else is white noise. If we choose only to fill our lives with the things that truly matter, we have so much more free space to enjoy those things. Even as I’m writing, in my brain I’m going, oh gosh this sounds hard… but in the long run I think it will be worth it.