How to Homestead the Slow Way

I’ve noticed something kind of scary happening these past few years. Folks that I know, friends and neighbors, who embarked on their homesteading journey to escape the rat race of life have been looking increasingly frazzled.

You know what I mean. Wide eyes with a thousand-yard stare, constantly revved up, hustling through conversations like they have somewhere to be. A general malaise of stress and frantic energy hanging over them.

Life isn’t always a picnic, of course, but it’s an unusual pattern. One day, it all clicked for me. Everybody is complaining about how much they have to do, and how little time they have to do it in!

It’s awfully sad because these folks, and that includes me, have traded one rat race for another. It’s time to reclaim our lives and refocus on why we started homesteading in the first place. But to do that, we’ve got to go back to doing it the slow way. And in this article, I’m going to make a case for it. I hope you’ll hear me out!

The Pace of Modern Life is a Tax on Your Sanity

The great paradox of modern life is that we have never before enjoyed quite so much labor-saving and efficiency-boosting technology. No matter what it is you’re trying to do, there is a gadget, program, protocol or some other trick to getting it done as quickly as possible.

This is done in quest, of course, of getting on to the next thing on your to-do list. Keep hustling, keep going faster and faster, ever faster, and pretty soon your chore list will be over and you can just do… what, exactly? Nothing? Whatever you want?

Of course not. I mean, it could work that way but it never, ever does for anyone that I have ever known. Chores abhor a vacuum, and they always expand to fit an empty space. Getting through your to-do list faster and faster means you’ll only ever have even more ahead of you.

You’ve traded a sedate problem-solving pace for mach-speed checklist checking. And I’m here to tell you, it’s making us all crazy.

To Live Better, You Have to Slow Down

Homework assignment, and it’s due right now: close your eyes and think for a second about everything you did this year or this month so far for a few seconds. Go back and walk yourself through every significant event and every task you accomplished.

Open your eyes. Well, they are already open because you’re reading this. Are you drawing some blanks? Does it feel like there’s a time warp between one major event or catastrophe and the next until, somehow, inexplicably, you’ve arrived at the current day?

What you are experiencing is the consequence of living life at hypervelocity. Remember how our grandparents and great-grandparents always warned us to stop and smell the roses? To enjoy the little things? To be present? This is why.

You can’t enjoy the scenery of your own life if you’re hurtling by at 150 mph. One day, the darkness will close in and you’ll go crazy because you’ll realize how out of control you are, how fruitless it has all been. You might be feeling that way lately if you’re anything like me.

There’s no cure for this except the one: you have to slow down and live more deliberately, and a big part of that is doing your work at a normal human pace, not what the world or our society tells us the ideal is.

Are You Worried About Getting Less Done?

Here’s the part where people start getting upset at me. They talk about the grind, the hustle, hard work, grit, stick-to-it-iveness, and all the rest. They might even drop the dreaded L bomb on a fellow homesteader: lazy!

I’ve heard it all before, and Lord knows I can’t reach some people. But I have a rubric that ruthlessly cuts through all of this noise and all of this speculation.

What do you have to do today that must be done today? Everything else is elective.

Simple, right? And no, it isn’t a cry for procrastination. Most tasks we think we have to get done today to save time actually don’t have to be done at all, or at least not today, or else they are complex, lengthy projects that have to be tackled in manageable chunks or else with a small army of people.

Some things you might have to do today, and every day, are chores like feeding and watering your animals, closing or opening gates, putting in work to get your salable products to market, preparing meals, taking care of the kiddos, watering and tending your garden, and so forth. All day, every single day, today.

Painting the siding or a fence, getting a cord of firewood chopped, stacked, seasoned and ready for winter, laying new gravel on the driveway and so forth don’t have to be done today, not really. Chances are good you’ll work on these tasks incrementally over time and you’ll have to budget time for them accordingly.

Are you starting to see the outlines of the spell? Modernity promises us that if we will only partake of its labor-saving and time-saving innovations we could burn through all of those tasks in merely a fraction of the time!

It’s a lie: you won’t really get things done quicker, because you’ll just flip from one short and aggravating task to the next with extreme speed, and your days will expand until your schedule is now dozens and dozens of these little annoying tasks and not four or five larger, slower but more meaningful and ultimately more pleasurable ones.

Good Things Always Take Time: Embrace It!

My granddad always told me that good things take time. It’s certainly true! Dating and courting the right partner, raising a field of crops, waiting for your animals to reach maturity, saving up for a car or other prized possession, giving your entire property a good spring clean, and so much more.

Americans, you and me, culturally are possessed by the notion of the dragster sprint to the goal and the prize. We have long forgotten how to enjoy the journey and accordingly so much of the sweetness and honey in life has been bleached away by the harsh alcohol of efficiency.

Let me give you an example. If you have to brush and bathe one of your horses, do you always blow through as quickly as possible because you’ve got so much more to do? Do you think your horse really knows you care about it? Do you have a bond with it? Have you stopped admiring it as just a magnificent animal that is yours? When was the last time you stopped to admire the beauty of its coat, the strength of its muscles and the great bellows of its breath?

Maybe it’s been a while, yeah? Isn’t that a shame! I’m not saying this to shame you or hurt you; I’m saying this to warn you and hopefully rescue you. It happened to me, and it’s happened to so many people that I know. I’ll bet it’s happened to you.

But just like everything else for us homesteaders, it’s up to us to figure it out and fix it, and this is a problem that’s way past time to fix.

When You Slow Down, You’ll Prioritize Better

When I started consciously tapping the brakes and living my homesteading journey slowly with deliberation, something crazy happened. I mean really; I thought I was going crazy, literally gaslighting myself.

I started slowing down, actively taking more time to do the same chores and tasks. And you know what happened? Not only did I get everything done, but everything felt easier and went more smoothly. How is that possible!?

I’ll tell you how: when you slow down and really think through how to plan and organize your day in the morning, over a nice leisurely breakfast, you make better choices when it comes to fitting those tasks into your day, the rest of your week and the rest of the month.

I wasn’t sweating buckets trying to keep a timetable anymore. There was time enough. I was enjoying myself. I was waking up refreshed, ready to go and eager to get to work on my life in my way. I started going to bed tired, sure, but not dreading the alarm clock.

It astounded me, and I’ve got to level with you, it made me pretty mad, too. Like I said above, this life way, if you want to call it that, has been inflicted on all of us. We’ve been seduced by it, drawn in by it, led away by it. It’s high time that stops.

Homestead Slowly, Intentionally, and Enjoy a Richer Life

I know it sounds stupid simple, and it is, but I promise this will make a big difference for you like it did for me. Make the choice to do things the slow way whenever you can, as long as it’s possible, and I promise you’ll see the difference.

Maybe it’s making a few trips back and forth with your watering can instead of dragging out the hose. You might like to paint or stain with a brush instead of going through the trouble of hooking up the power sprayer.

I myself restored and took up a nice double-bit axe for tending to the trees around my property, and splitting my firewood with a maul instead of my noisy splitter and chainsaw. Yeah, I don’t get quite as much done but I’ve been enjoying the workout, the quiet and I actually look forward to doing a little bit each day instead of one long weekend full of roaring noise and frenzy that leaves my head cloudy and ears ringing.

My friends, for us homesteaders the slow life is the best and richest life. I hope you’ll slow down a little bit too!