Every time I slow down, I start thinking about land.
Not in a romantic, Instagram-homestead kind of way — just in a quiet, practical sense. The more I step away from rushing, noise, and constant stimulation, the more obvious it becomes that most of what I want out of life already exists outside of modern speed.
Slowing down doesn’t make me lazy.
It makes things clearer.
When life moves fast, everything feels abstract. Money comes and goes. Work piles up. Days blur together. You’re always reacting, rarely choosing. But when I slow down — when I actually take time to notice what I’m doing — my thoughts naturally drift toward things that are real and grounded.
Soil. Weather. Food. Work that shows results.
That’s probably why my idea of a slower life eventually turns into thoughts about gardening, fixing things myself, and one day living farther from town. I didn’t start with a desire to homestead. I started with a desire to breathe. The rest followed naturally. That’s something I touched on in why I choose a slower life — it wasn’t a plan, it was a realization.
Land forces you to slow down whether you want to or not.
Plants grow when they’re ready, not when you’re impatient. Weather doesn’t care about schedules. Tools require maintenance or they fail you at the worst time. You can’t rush any of it without consequences. There’s something honest about that.
Even now, living on a small lot in town, I feel it when I’m in the garden. The rest of the world fades out. No notifications. No urgency. Just work, time, and attention. That same feeling shows up when I’m sitting outside doing absolutely nothing — something I wrote about in sitting outside and doing nothing — where time stretches back to a human pace.
Slowing down also exposes how disconnected modern life can feel. We’re surrounded by convenience, yet constantly exhausted. Everything is faster, but nothing feels finished. I don’t think that’s a personal failure — I think it’s a design problem.
That’s why homesteading, to me, isn’t an escape fantasy. It’s a correction. A return to cause and effect. A way to trade constant mental noise for simple physical effort. I explained that more fully in what homesteading really means to me (and what it doesn’t) — it’s less about land ownership and more about how you choose to live.
I don’t have acres. I don’t have animals. I don’t have it all figured out.
But I know this: every time I remove speed from my life, I move closer to the things that matter. And every time I imagine the future I want, it looks quieter, slower, and more rooted than the one I’m standing in now.
Maybe slowing down doesn’t lead everyone back to the land.
But it always leads me there.
– Just a note from the yard.