Time flies by when you’re having fun.
Haven’t we all heard this one and agreed with it every single time? As I slowly removed seeds studded like jewels from a nice, ripe pomegranate today, I wondered. Is it even true or have we just accepted it to be the prevalent truth?
These times of lockdown and self isolation have perhaps unlocked another strength in many of us. The ability to slow down.
At around two weeks of lock down, I feel slow life has its own romance. one that most of us have missed for most of our lives. I don’t think I’ve ever cooked every day in my life. Like ever.
My mother was a working woman yet she would always manage the kitchen herself. Since she worked outside of the house too she always equipped us with all possible shortcuts by example. Large batch cooking, portion freezing, vegetable cleaning washing, cutting up and freezing. Everything in the kitchen was always organised and a lot of times even half prepared to ensure a lavish dinner at a short notice.
Skip a generation before them and everything was painstakingly perfect yet painfully time consuming. Or at least that’s what I always thought because it is overthinking that tires us. Not the processes themselves.
The meticulous low-flame dry roasting of masala and then grinding them in a mortar and pestle or a sill battaa. Planning a meal and taking it from scratch to end. Reading a book not in a hurry to finish it but to savour and absorb every chapter, every page such that you befriend the characters as your very own.
Sadness melts away as you pick each little leaf of coriander and lovingly clean it, despair is nowhere to be seen when you patiently allow the chopped onion to brown on the lowest heat, forming the “golden circle”
I finally. FINALLY see how this choice of a lifestyle would work for some. How caring for loved ones and caring for their homes can be more than enough and stepping out of the household to have a working career of one’s own in the dog eat dog world easily slips into becoming secondary.
It probably still isn’t for me. I’m just not good enough at home as great I have always been at work. Basic confidence issues in the home setting I guess. But I see it. I see the attraction in the slow life.
Today my husband asked for pasta, thinking I will use one of the Sauces that come in a jar and are around in our pantry and I decided to make a ragu from scratch. He polished it off but he also polished off the one that came in a jar last week. Though this one had joy.
I made him taste the sauce while I cooked it (because I can’t even taste it while I’m cooking. Makes me severely nauseous. Cooking just blocks off my ability to eat altogether. Perhaps I keep smelling it and my brain thinks I’ve had my meal. That’s dumb for an organ that’s meant to keep me alive but I’d rather not freak out about that. So much else to overthink at 4am.)
So I made him taste it while I cooked. He loved it. Was slightly apologetic so see me make it from scratch but the twinkle in his eye was unmatchable when he said don’t change a thing after tasting it.
Browning onions, simmering tomatoes and rosemary in it, chopping garlic and stirring in the milk. The slower I went the more pleasure it exuded.
I can understand how people, my grandmothers would spend hours in the kitchen and yet always be on top of the rest of the house. Never did I ever see them complain of being tired or needing a nap.
They held joy in their process of life. They cracked it. Without a COVID19 limiting them to the confines of their homes.
This quarantine hasn’t changed too much about my life. I work from home. I practice social distancing from most of Lahore because well, my heart is forever in Karachi and London. The only thing that’s different is I don’t have any house help and in a weird way, I do like it. Sure I don’t Enjoy cleaning and washing. That’s just not me but I love the fact that when I cook and clean, I do it with my heart and I am not shoving mess under the rugs or leaving anything behind the shelves. I have little patience with house help because I love my mess as long as it is my own but when I clean, I know the quality success factors that I adhere to.
This entire fiasco has slowed us all down. Kicking and screaming but it is indeed a forced introspective journey we’ve all been sent on. The world that was designed for extroverts to live and excel in, has turned into an introvert’s paradise. The constant chaos that was life in the fast lane, forcibly takes a backseat while lawn chairs emerge again from the attic and sunlit mornings in the lawn enforce calm breakfast and partial snoozing in the sun.
As people work from home for the first time, (something I have now done for years and shared my learnings in another post here), breaks between meetings and work don’t only feature a forced walk around the office, it sometimes also involves quickly baking a cake or whipping up a salad to munch on during the next conference call. Appearances and emphasis on those, blur as sweatshirts and pearls are adequate attire for a formal meeting. Reminds you how meaningless the outer image is as focus shifts to what we say as opposed to how we look.
The hours in a day are exactly the same. We are spending them differently. There is no race against time and that is how even after carefully removing every single seed from a pomegranate, a task that gave me anxiety and I absolutely abhorred before lockdown, took only fifteen minutes on the clock but it felt like I had spent years observing the patterns of those rubies studded in the globe.
I’m relaxed and my child has started putting herself to bed for the past week too. Was it my constant rush to do twenty million things in a day that rubbed off on her and made her too frantic to relax without an object or action of comfort?
I’m sure it has an impact.
The world will look very different on the other side of this pandemic. There will be many people who won’t be with us any more. So many others changed forever by what they were exposed to. There will be many who will mature exponentially and those who will emerge with newer perils holding them close.
Meanwhile. This slow life, I can get used to. It seems to have touched my heart in ways more than one and unlocked abilities I never imagined I had any more or thought I’d locked away for good.
I saw a glimpse of my teenage years in myself and though it felt incredibly lonely without my grandparents, life feels at peace.
May the world see times of wellness and never ending health again.
