Untimely: coming, said, done, etc. before the usual or proper time; premature, unseasonable (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language)
It is a perfect storm of reading:
There’s No Such Thing As Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom’s Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids by Linda McGurk
The Hurried Child by psychologist David Elkind
Cured: The Life-Changing Science of Spontaneous Healing by Dr. Jeffrey Rediger
At first glance, perhaps the first two would seem related, but the third not so much. Yet all three have a common concern: stress. Hurry. Busyness. They delve into how chronic haste and stress can manifest in development, mental health, and our physical bodies.
McGurk observed the changes brought over her American children when they spent several months in her native Sweden, spending most of their waking hours exploring the woods with friends. They went from iPads to mud pies with alacrity, and she writes convincingly of the importance for all of us in being outside, not commuting from activity to activity, hurried.
Elkind was ahead of his time in addressing the pressure parents are putting on kids to excel, overloading them with extracurriculars, eroding free time. He was dismissed when the book first published in 1981. With the rise of teen suicides and depression, his book is now finding a receptive audience.
Dr. Rediger explores the factors surrounding spontaneous healing of various incurable, fatal diseases. Many of those who made miraculous recoveries drastically reduced the busyness and stress from their lives, along with eating whole foods and exercising.
I’ve written before on the subject of busyness here and here, but I often feel like I’m speaking to a wall. Our culture is suffused with this idea that movement=progress=success, so everyone is chugging along at breakneck speed so that they, and their children, don’t “fall behind”. I feel like a mother walking her children through a meadow; we examine the flowers, the bugs, we feel the wind on our faces, and watch the slow drift of the clouds. Past us flies a high speed train full of families, baseball bats and ballet slippers, sheets of homework, and bags of fast food are barely visible as they fly past to the town we’re slowly walking to. They do get to the town first, but it seems like they don’t even walk the town, they run through it, hit the shops, and hop back on the train to the next place. I am stubbornly insisting that racing through life doesn’t win you anything. It may in fact cost you everything.
So my equation is slowness=presence=living fully. I do not think this will secure for me any guarantee of perfect health, nor worldly success, nor that my children be superior to anyone else’s, only that I will be present within my life, within this time; that I will live in wonder and enjoyment, that peace will not be illusive, that my children will see this way of living which relies not on breathless hurry, but stillness, joy, and open time.
I miss having the ability to live in an area where yards have trees and bushes. Our uninviting (rented) backyard is a plot of grass encircled with fence, connected to several other fences, and the two story houses look down on each other’s yards. At our family size (9) inside space is non-negotiable and this is the type of neighborhood we can afford. Our ramble, overgrown, wild yard in MS was my idea of a backyard: azaleas encroaching on everything, trees overhanging, a small “wooded area” on one side up against the fence, a tumble-down shed, dirt areas, an ivy-covered path next to the house, and chickens that persisted in flying over the fence from the neighbor’s yard and building nests in the woodpile. Sigh. One day…
Oh yes…half of our yard is mud/dirt and the green areas have worn tracks from bicycles. It is an eyesore-heartsoar sort of place. It is hard to live within the practical limits of our limitations. Before we moved here we lived in Chile, in a tiny house with a tiny stone yard, no trees. I took regular walks in rural areas to compensate for my tree/green deprivation!
Amen.