Dog Dayz & The Wisdom of Slowing Down

Lately, it has been so incredibly hot.

Not just here in Northern Virginia. Across much of the Northern Hemisphere, summer has settled in with a kind of relentless intensity. Drought. Wildfire. Heat shimmering above pavement. Gardens drooping by afternoon. The air itself feels heavy, as though even it has grown tired of moving.

And with the heat comes a kind of wilting of our energy.

Everyone and everything seems to be moving a little slower. People linger in the shade. Birds disappear into the trees during the hottest part of the day. The garden looks exhausted by three o’clock. Even the dog doesn’t want to leave the front porch.

“Just let that dog I don’t like go by,” says Reid.

“This time.”

One of the gifts of August may be that it is simply too damn hot to do anything but nothing.

And I kind of like that.

I’m not particularly fond of spending summer sealed inside air conditioning, so lately I’ve been sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, watching the world go by. Even that can become a sweat fest. The chair creaks beneath me. Mocking birds scream from the trees. A neighbor wanders past with a dog. Somewhere a lawn mower starts and then, mercifully, stops. A glass sweats on the table beside me.

Nothing particularly important happens.

And yet, without a doubt, the energy has changed.

Growth Has Seasons

We tend to treat slowing down as failure.

If we aren't producing, improving, achieving, exercising, organizing, optimizing, or becoming some marginally superior version of ourselves, we assume something has gone wrong.

But what if there is a season for slowing down too?

Perhaps that is part of why I love this particular shift in the year. Beneath the heat and the cicadas and the overgrown gardens, I can already sense the invitation of autumn coming. Longer evenings. Cooler mornings. Earlier darkness. And eventually winter, when the whole living world seems to whisper:

Enough now.

Rest.

Nature does not sustain maximum output indefinitely, and neither can we. Our bodies move naturally between activation and recovery. Muscles rebuild after exertion. Attention restores itself through rest. Creativity often needs periods of apparent inactivity before something new emerges.

There is wisdom in the pause.

August offers a gentle correction to our obsession with perpetual spring. Not every season is for beginning, expanding, producing, or becoming.

Some seasons are for tending what already exists.

Practice: Remove One Hurry

This is one of my favorite practices because it asks us to add absolutely nothing. And because as a Taurus, it taps into one of my core ways of being: slow. 

Today, remove one hurry.

Choose something you normally rush through and do it differently.

Sip your coffee and do nothing else but watch the world go by.

Walk without headphones. Forget the step count.

Eat sensually. Chew more. Taste more. Notice salt and sweetness, texture and temperature. Put down your fork between bites and let yourself actually finish one before reaching for another.

Drive without the radio. Maybe even without GPS if you know where you're going.

Take the long way.

Then notice what happens inside your body when you deliberately refuse urgency.

You may discover how much hurry you've been carrying without realizing it.

Carry On

Ask yourself each morning: What pace does today actually require?

Not every day deserves your maximum effort.

Some days ask you to grow.

Some ask you to gather.

And some simply ask you to ripen in the sun.