Hello mates! The day is finally here! The first episode of the tortoise & the hare is live and I’m so excited for it to be in your earholes/eyeballs.
A decade of creating the Slow Home Pod together has left Ben and I with some deeply ingrained podcasting habits, so we’re giving ourselves a little bit of time to work out the format of the Fresh Exciting Thing.
We filmed another few episodes yesterday and, while video is a brand-new and deeply uncomfortable ballgame for me, things are coming together. We recorded chats about some of the dualities we find ourselves navigating (rigid & flexible, wrinkles & pimples, fun & boring) and where along the spectrum we are. I can’t wait to share them with you.
But first, we’re going to look… backwards, I guess? It might sound like we’re retreading old ground, but it felt really important that we start this new chapter with a final exploration of slow living (No, really!) Because, while it helped me so much for so long, it also eventually became a prison.
I spent years paralysed, unable to move forward, make choices or feel at ease with compromise. It took months of work unpacking and unlearning the harmful stories I’d been telling myself before I finally understood why.
I’d attached a moral judgement to the speed of life, where ‘slow’ was the good thing and ‘fast’ was the bad. Or at the very least, fast was the thing that I personally wasn’t allowed to do. In trying to find a gentler way, I’d ended up at a harsh extreme.
Plus, watching the entire slow living movement of kind, well-intentioned people get swallowed up by the multibillion-dollar wellness industry of grifters and optimisation bros was hard to come to terms with. #slow became a tool of comparison, an Instagram aesthetic, something greedy and materialistic, and I had absolutely no idea how to make peace with the fact that I still loved the essence of it and wanted nothing to do with it.
It was in that tension that the tortoise & the hare was born. So, by way of gratitude and explanation and paying our respects to a formative part of our lives, this week’s topic is fast & slow.
how I first discovered slow living
how it helped me and our family
the combination of perfectionism and desperation that led to increasingly extreme standards
how those standards gradually impacted my mental health and ability to grow and change
what it was like for Ben to watch me become more restricted
why he firmly believes slow living is a cult (and why I firmly disagree)
how I began to detach from harmful extremes
where we find ourselves now on the spectrum of speed
·
Aug 19
listen to the first episode of the tortoise & the hare, where Ben and I revisit slow living one last time (no, really!) to see where we exist on the spectrum of speed today.
Take a listen at the link above or subscribe via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or your favourite pod-dealing platform.
from the archives: Too much of something good is still too much
from the archives: The fondest farewell
painting hyperfixation song: My Old Ways by Tame Impala
bearded flower crown man on IG: jonathanhiebert
listen on spotify | apple | pocketcasts | and all other quality pod providers
if video is your jam, subscribe to @thetortoiseandthehare on YouTube
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And that’s it for the first episode of the tortoise & the hare. I hope you enjoy it, and would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much for being here.
Brooke 💚
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