Peaceful Pauses
I've been quiet recently.
It's been incredibly noticeable over the last two weeks how much I've felt the need to be quiet. To be alone. To be invisible. Life has been challenging, and that has no doubt contributed, but I'm also conscious that some time withdrawing from the world has done me good. We rarely press the pause button - our society tells us we must be going, doing, producing constantly. But that's not sustainable, and it's not a life we were designed for.
Someone I worked with years ago used to say to me, when I was overdoing it, "sit down before you fall down." Her words ring in my ears regularly, and they're words I think we could all learn from.
New Moon in Taurus
I never used to be one for astrology, but, the more I learn about the phases of the moon, the more I lean into the lunar cycles. It was interesting to note that my sudden impulse to withdraw coincided with the waning moon, and was at its strongest on the last few days of the moon disappearing from the sky. Then I read that this latest new moon in Taurus is particularly associated with a need to slow down and listen to where your life is out of alignment. It packs the biggest punch, apparently, for people who live lives of "busyness" that they use as excuses for not prioritising their own dreams and nurturing their selves. Ouch, consider me told.
So maybe it was the pull of the moon sending me inward with a desire to quietly reflect. She moves the oceans around, changes the seasons, and influences the life cycles of various flora and fauna, it doesn't seem impossible that she might exert some influence on me.
But you don't need to believe in the power of the moon to benefit from luna cycles. Whether that rock in the sky has any affect on us or not, she teaches us a valuable lesson that everything in life is seasonal and cyclical. We go through phases, just like the moon and the Earth. Our energies ebb and flow like the tides. We can't be "always on", we need moments to rest and reflect, to recover and recharge.
Those pauses then allow us to have focus and intent when our energy has returned. We have had time to consider our direction, and we can go at it full speed, knowing we don't have to keep this pace up forever. Knowing there is a rest stop around the corner makes it much easier to give your all for now.
The new moon is a time for reorienting yourself, checking you're still facing your true north, and making plans for where you want to go next. As the moon begins to return to the sky, I can feel myself becoming ready to move forward again, with a clearer idea of where I'm going.
Sit down. Take a breath. Allow yourself your own natural rhythm. You'll go further if you're not fighting against yourself on the way.
When did life become a race?
When did it get like this, though? When did we start feeling like we should never stop? That our self worth depended on giving all of our self to... what? A corporate job? The capitalist machine?
It’s interesting to note how many industries have grown up around this feeling of overwhelm. Stressed in your job? Burned out from parenting? Not looking after your body? Not taking care of your mind? Here’s a course, or a product, or a book you can buy that will fix all that. We’ve been told that the answer to happiness, peace, contentment is to buy more. Consume more. Because that’s what keeps a capitalist society going. Yet this impact on our happiness, on our energy levels, on our sense of peace started with the birth of capitalism. The Industrial Revolution then took us downhill fast. Suddenly we were expected to work long hours fairly continuously (the “weekend” didn’t exist until the early 1900s, and it had to be fought for). Our value as humans began to be measured by how much we could produce. And to make that valuable, we also needed people to consume.
When you take yourself out of the capitalist machine for a while, when you allow yourself to stop, is often where you find true peace.
It might not be possible to opt out of capitalism completely - not yet, anyway (perhaps we can work on that…) - but we can take the occasional break.