Rules for a Slower Life

My family left the hustle and bustle of American civilization in 2010. We didn’t move back to the States until 2014. When we left for the Middle East, I owned a Razr flip phone. (Smartphones weren’t yet a required appendage.)

It was incredibly eerie when we stepped back on American soil in 2014. Everyone had these tiny screens attached to the palms of their hands or pulled up in front of their faces. Every place I went, people asked if they could text me. When I told them I didn’t have a cell phone, they looked at me with confused expressions. I had to practically beg my mother-in-law to let me drive without a phone in the car with me. (I had done this my whole life. Why was it suddenly unsafe?)

When we finally bit the bullet and entered a cell phone store to get our own phones, the lady working there looked completely dumbfounded when my husband and I explained that these would be our first smartphones. “What? Were you missionaries or something?”

No, but our life sure was remote.

In 2010 we moved halfway across the world with our two toddler sons and our Dalmatian. My husband was stationed as a military physician on Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, just a short distance from the Syrian border.

The base had incredible security, so leaving wasn’t something we could do easily. (Think having to go through airport security every time you wanted to leave. Throw in some dogs that would sniff everything you own every time you decided to leave home, and the fact that you would have to take your kids in and out of their car seats each time you exited and entered, and you’d have a good understanding of why we thought long and hard before venturing off the base.)

Instead, we hunkered down with a few hundred other American families in a Mayberry-style atmosphere. No one locked their doors. Kids ran free to play at the base’s parks. Holidays were spent with surrogate families. No one had a cell phone. (Seriously, I mean no one!) If we needed someone, we just walked around to the few locations on base until we found them. The base had a pool, a library, a movie theater, a small grocery store, a Base Exchange or “BX” (think tiny Walmart), and a three-restaurant food court. We moved around in utter safety with little concern.

Quite honestly, most days we had nothing to do, so we all did nothing together. Every Wednesday the manager of the community center opened the doors and blew up all the bouncy castles he had to let the mothers give their kids space to play. There wasn’t a cost; he was just helping us pass the time. We’d go for walks with no end goal in mind. Once we decided to see how many of the base parks we could visit in one day. We could have only one car, so my “car” was a stroller for the baby and my boys on little three-wheelers. Yet we were never bored.

My husband owed the military four years of service in exchange for their paying for medical school, so in 2012 we left Turkey and headed to our next base. We were placed on a tiny island in the Azores.

If you look at a map of the world and draw a line between the East Coast of the United States and Portugal, you’ll hit a tiny string of islands in the middle of the Atlantic. We lived on Terceira,  a nineteen-by-twenty-one-mile island truly in the middle of nowhere. While we lived off the base this time, the same basic protocol was in place. This was an island without a single fast-food restaurant or mall. While there, we added a fourth child to our family and spent our days meandering around our tiny village. We ate dinner every week at Buzius, down the street from our house, where my husband let the Portuguese chef surprise him with whatever some fisherman had just brought in. We spent leisurely weekend days sitting at the “Red Café,” having a donut or Portuguese coffee. We climbed the volcanic rocks lining the coast of the island, measured the sunflowers growing outside our house, started a garden, and attended the local running of the bulls regularly. A door-to-door vegetable truck and fish salesman were part of our normal.

When my mother returned to the States after visiting me in the Azores, she called me one day and said, “I finally get what you were telling me about the slow life. What in the world is everyone in such a hurry for here in America?”

Exactly.

Without a doubt, the main thing my husband and I “feared” about our return to America was losing the slow pace of life we had come to know and love in Turkey and the Azores. Few options and small communities had created a limited amount of outside influence in our lives for four years. While the frustration of not having Amazon at the tips of our fingers was real, we knew we’d been given a gift, and we embraced it knowing it had an end date.

Upon returning to the USA in 2014, we bought a farm in East Tennessee. But we knew that, despite the rural life we had chosen, the hustle and bustle would find its way back to us if we let it. So we put some “rules” in place.

First Thessalonians 4:11–12 tells us to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody” (NIV). First Timothy 6:6–8 echoes this sentiment: “Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that” (NIV).

Here are some things we strive for on our 96-acre homestead in the South. You may live in an apartment in Manhattan or a beach home in California or in the suburbs of an American neighborhood, but I don’t think rural living is necessary to slow down. I encourage you to think about the pace of your life. Choose a few things on this list to work on to help you simplify. A slower pace of life can give you more time for what truly matters.

• Get rid of cable TV. You can still watch shows and movies on Netflix and Hulu, but these services require you to be more intentional about what you choose to watch.
• Take a Sabbath. Take a real Sabbath day, deciding what this looks like for your family. We strive to not get on our devices on the Sabbath and to stay home other than going to church. We play board games and focus on fellowshipping within our own home.
• Simplify what you have. What do you really need? Think about all areas of your life—clothing, food, travel, recreation—and cut out the superfluous.
• Limit technology. This looks different for each family. In our case, we say “no technology in public,” which helps us focus on the world around us. While at home, we have strict rules in place to limit use.
• Limit entertaining. As fun as it is to get together with friends, don’t let fellowship overrun your family time. Figure out a way to be home together in the evening and on weekends without guests, at least some of the time.
• Eat right. We decided to completely avoid fast food and try to make eating at home our norm.
• Splurge in the right places. With money we’d saved from not eating out, we decided to have someone clean our house once a week. (We’d rather be home together eating macaroni than eating out and having to come home to a messy house.)
• Avoid commercialism. I cannot tell you what a shock to the system an American mall is when you haven’t been in one for several years. In general, we try to avoid malls and places that are loud and screaming “Buy me!”
• Limit activities. This category is hard with four kids, but we try to figure out ways to not be running all over tarnation for sports and clubs. Keeping our evenings free is a priority.
• Travel mindfully. After living overseas for four years, we really wanted to focus on being home together. Traveling, while fun, is expensive and stressful. So we choose our vacations carefully. Your family may find some kinds of vacations fun and relaxing but others stressful. Figure out what works for you!

First John 2:17 tells us that “the world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.” Even the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10 reminds us that busying ourselves with “life” can distract us from what truly matters.

Take a deep breath. You don’t have to live in the middle of nowhere to see that a slow life can do us all good!

Wendi Kitsteiner is a former city girl now living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee with her husband and four young children. She is passionate about the causes of infertility, adoption, and keeping it real as a mom. You can follow her at flakymn.blogspot.com or becauseofisaac.org.

Photograph © Palash Jain, used with permission