Slowly, Slowly, Slowly…All of a Sudden

The Unremarkable Work of Building a Remarkable Life

Photo by Mike Hsieh on Unsplash

I’ve been quiet here these past weeks. It wasn’t my intention, but my body had other plans— eyes and skin staging a not-so-subtle revolt. (Think “racoon circles of painful inflammation” and you’re getting the idea.)

It’s also been a season of internal wrestling and reckoning. In August, I bid farewell to my last chemo series only to be greeted with news that my team wanted to extend treatment another twelve months—a “non-chemo drug” notorious for severe side effects. (While I remain so grateful for my hopeful prognosis, the rigor of more treatment has been a hard pill to swallow— literally.)

More subtly, I’ve also been busy with the work of change management. Turns out, eighteen months of chemo—falling like clockwork every few weeks—is a pretty sure way to remake a life. New habits, new routines, and new thought loops winding their way into established paths: How do I sustain this new spiritual practice of receiving from others? How can I live in humility and gratitude—meeting the day as it comes? Why doesn't everyone have a support team? Before you know it, the questions are hosting you. 

In all these ways (and more!) life has been hard and full. And it’s been more art than science, as I coax my new self back into old rhythms and rooms. Yet for all the raw materials here—what we might simply call “life”—none of it has felt like fodder for good headlines or engaging copy. 

Maybe in some ways you can relate?

On any given day, the simple act of living is all you can manage. At the same time, it’s not the sort of thing you’d want to read or write about. It’s all so—how might we say it?—average.

The truth is, so often we know our stories, ours and others, by their headlines: an unexpected disruption, a delightful surprise, a new direction. And while these catch our attention, the deeper work of becoming is nearly always more discrete. 

Most of the time, that part is boring and slow, sometimes painfully so.

Making a similar point, but working from the other direction, Andy Crouch uses the analogy of Rome: “What’s the one thing you can do with Rome in a day? Answer: “You can burn it.” The not-so subtle implication is this: it takes years—generations—to build a brilliant city like Rome. Surely the same is true of our lives: the truest, most beautiful things grow slowly and often in near obscurity.

In describing this work of building the lives we mean to live, N.T. Wright puts it like this:

Virtue is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which is good and right, but which doesn't come naturally. And then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what's required automatically. Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices become second nature.¹

For better or worse, “second nature” is the stuff of habit formation. (Or un-formation—winding back responses and routines we never meant to build.) And progress in that terrain happens slowly, slowly, slowly…all of a sudden, which is why the headlines are few and far between.

What if it’s time to change our minds about what is spotlight-worthy? Whatever your personal headlines these days—and it must be said that the least snappy ones will often be hardest to bear—they are getting worked out in painstaking detail: question by question, tear by tear, scene by scene. 

The analogy of reading might be helpful, except that—of course—we read at a pace much faster than we will become. (Still, sitting down with a book might be a simple first step in growing the kind of capacity we’ll need to become the people we aim to be.)

Photo by Alice Hampson on Unsplash

As worthy work unlocks new parts of you, neither you nor the work is supported when every headline is about the big, brilliant (finished) thing.

Four years ago, I chose the name Storyboard Coaching to highlight my work alongside leaders and teams wanting to honor this deeper, quieter work. Storyboards (think comic strips) invite us to bear in mind that nearly all of the action happens quietly, unremarkably, between the frames:

• Discerning our priorities and right-sizing our commitments

• Reckoning with the need to forgive

• Taking ownership over our responses when things don’t go as planned

• Building structures & systems that support our focus and help us to navigate ego, laziness, or distraction

• Finding joy

This list could go on and on. This kind of work is important, yet it lives in forgettable spaces – easily unseeable. It’s deeply personal, but impossible to do alone. It seems “extra” or even annoying, yet it reverberates across our lives and broader systems in unimaginable ways.

Sometimes we want to skip right over it, but what if we could recover a sense of play and wonder in these very places? Afterall, Lucy was playing a simple game of hide and seek, a child in wartime Europe passing the time, when a humble wardrobe gave way to Narnia. What if, like Lucy, we had some discoveries to make? 

Maybe we thought transformation came with a bang, but now we’re seeing a more dimensional unfolding— realizing that it usually starts quiet and slow, and then shines into fullness. Maybe we thought the thing we wanted was impossibly far away, but now we’re wondering if it might be closer than we’d imagined—just one or two habits out of reach.

Dear ones, this is almost always the pathway to change. But to access the bright side of this radiant truth, we will need to recover a vision, a pace, and a practice—and probably some support—that allows us to step into messy mistakes, monotonous tries, and honest attempts at growth (re: failure). We will need to be patient with ourselves and develop a capacity for not always looking good or being in control or being right. 

It’s a journey that’s not for the faint of heart, but if we’ll embrace it, we may well discover portals—gateways into entirely new ways of being and knowing and doing. The first step is to notice the wardrobe door, quietly twist its handle, then tuck yourself in amongst the mothball-scented sweaters and sleeves. Surely a world of adventure is just on the other side.

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1.  N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters