Nobody Photographs the Watering

The Five Pillars of Slowsteading, Part Five: Do

Nobody has ever thought to take a photograph of me watering. There are pictures of the full baskets and the jars standing in their rows, and not one of me walking the same short route with a can in each hand, doing the least interesting job in the entire arrangement for the several thousandth time.

It is the job that keeps all the others alive. Miss it for long enough and there are no baskets to photograph, and this is as close as I can get to explaining the fifth pillar to anybody, because doing is the watering. It is the part with no drama in it, and it is the part that everything else depends on.

In the previous blog we talked about developing the skills, and about the failures that teach them. Doing is the last of the five, and it is the one people assume must be the easy one, since surely the hard part was learning how. I have come to think it is the hardest of them all, and for a reason that took me years to work out.

There is no arrival

Every one of the other pillars has an edge to it somewhere. You can finish a dream, in the sense of naming what it is you want, and you can clear a room and see that it is clear, and you can settle on your own design and recognise it as your own, and you can acquire a skill and know for certain that you have it.

Doing has no such edge anywhere in it, since the garden is never finished and neither is any household containing people who insist on eating regularly. Whatever you did yesterday will need doing again, and there is no point at which you get to stand back and say that the slowstead is complete and the living of it may now begin.

That is the whole difficulty, and it is also the whole answer. There is no version of this life that ever finally arrives. The doing is not the entrance fee for the life, it is the life itself, and the sooner a person makes peace with that the sooner they can stop waiting.

I waited for a long time without knowing I was waiting. I thought that once the vegetable beds were properly established, or once the preserving was under control, or once the house had settled into whatever shape I imagined it eventually taking, then I would be a woman living a slow and intentional life. Nothing of the sort ever happened, and what happened instead was that I noticed, on an entirely unremarkable morning with a can in my hand, that I had been living it for years while I was busy expecting it.

The days you do not feel like it

Here is the other reason this pillar is harder than it looks. Doing has to survive the days when there is nothing in you for it, and there will be plenty of those.

Slowsteading is not a shield, it never was, and I say so often because the pretty version of it circulating out there suggests otherwise. Difficult news still arrives, and hard conversations still have to be had, and the week still falls apart in the middle sometimes for no reason anybody could have predicted. Baking bread does not prevent any of that, and neither does a well tended garden.

What I have found is that the small round of things is worth keeping on precisely those days, not because it fixes anything, but because it puts you back in touch with yourself when everything else has gone sideways. I have sat outside in a week that was going badly and crocheted a few rows and picked a bunch of flowers for the table, with nothing resolved and nothing improved, and it grounded me in a way that crossing items off a list never has.

That is doing in its most honest form, not the productive version and not the photogenic one, but the ordinary business of showing up for the parts of your life that are still yours.

Doing includes the sitting still

It would be easy to read all of this as an argument for constant activity, and it is not one. A slowstead maintained by a woman who never once sits down in it is really just a small business with a vegetable patch.

Some of the most important doing I have ever managed has been to sit on the swing under the passionfruit arch with a cup of tea and go absolutely nowhere. I sit with a friend over our handwork and neither of us ever produces anything remotely urgent. My household is full of enthusiastic homebodies, and the sitting around a table long after the plates are empty is as much a part of the practice as anything I grow.

If the doing has become one more thing you are behind on, something has gone wrong in the design, and you are permitted to go back a pillar and redraw it.

The moment you stop performing it

There is a shift that happens somewhere in the middle of all this, and it is the quiet reward of the fifth pillar.

For a while you remain aware of doing it, conscious of being a person who makes her own stock or grows her own herbs, and there is a faint sense of performance about it even when nobody is watching but yourself. Then one day the awareness falls away entirely, and you are no longer doing slowsteading at all, you are making the stock because the bones were there and the pot was empty, and the whole framework has quietly dissolved into your actual life.

Dream, declutter, design, develop, do, and somewhere in there you stop performing slowsteading and simply start doing it.

All five, all the time

I have set these out as one to five, and the numbering has been useful for explaining them, but I would be misleading you if I let it stand without a correction. Life does not proceed through them in order, and nothing here has ever waited politely for the previous pillar to finish before starting.

On any ordinary day at this slowstead, all five are running at once. There is usually a project I am dreaming about that does not yet exist, a baking skill I am developing and am nowhere near confident in, a set of relationships or a digital footprint I am quietly decluttering, an arrangement in the house that has stopped working and wants redrawing, and underneath all of it the same round of small tasks that gets done whatever else is going on.

They are not a staircase but five things happening at the same time in the same life, and every new project you begin sets the whole cycle running again in miniature, so you may well be a beginner in one pillar while being thoroughly practised in another. That is not a sign of muddle, and it is certainly not a sign that you have skipped a step. It is what an actual life looks like from the inside.

The first can of water

Pick the least interesting task in whatever you have begun, the one with no photograph in it, and do that one faithfully. It might be watering the pots, or feeding the starter, or wiping the counter down properly at the end of the cooking, or putting the tools back where they belong.

Then notice how you feel about having done it, which in my experience is out of all proportion to the size of the task. That disproportion is the whole practice showing itself, and it is far more reliable evidence that this is working than any full basket ever was.

And on a day when you cannot manage any of it, do not manufacture guilt about it. Let it go and pick it up again, because a practice you can abandon and return to is the only kind that lasts in a life as full as yours.

The end of the five

That is the whole of it, a dream that fits the life you actually have, the space made for it, a design that is yours rather than borrowed, the skills that arrive by way of the failures, and then the doing that never finishes and never needs to.

None of it requires a farm or a free morning or a different family from the one you have. It requires a willingness to begin something small where you are standing, and then to keep watering it.

Which of the five are you standing in at the moment, and which one have you been avoiding? I have been avoiding one or another of them for most of my adult life, so you would be in good company, and I would be glad to hear about it, so do leave me a comment and tell me.