Slowing Down as a Belonging Practice:
Reflections on my biweekly posting schedule and on a reader’s newsletter
Dear City Person,
It has been a month and twenty days since I announced shifting my weekly posting schedule to a biweekly one before I take a 1-month break to reassess. I am taking time off from work from July 29 to August 29 so I thought that I also use this time to take a break from posting to focus on rest.
Coincidentally, I ran into a lovely post below called “Finding Rhythms of Rest and Renewal: How to Belong to Summer and other stories of belonging” written in a newsletter called by one of my new readers, . You can read this post by clicking on the link below.
I found it interesting how she connects the idea of rest with belonging. I thus thought to use this opportunity to reflect on this point from Prasanta’s post while also reflecting on what I have been appreciating about experimenting with different posting schedules so far.
Aside from rest, I plan to use my holiday to continue reading Rana AlMutawa’s book titled “Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai” so that I can reflect on it in my next post on August 30th. I invite readers to use this gap in my posts to read the book along with me and to catch up with any past posts they may have missed by clicking here to check out the archives.
Click here to find a copy of the book at your nearest public library wherever you are in the world. Click here to purchase a physical copy while supporting independent bookshops. You can also click here to find an electronic copy while supporting funding for libraries and global literacy.
Some house keeping before I dive in…
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I have usually had a tendency of starting things before stopping part way and I am sure many people can relate to this. This is why I found posting weekly gave me the momentum I needed to go on in the first 4.5 months of launching my first newsletter.
I loved entering a flow state whenever I would sit down and write a post and converse with readers in between. But I noticed that I had a hard time finding motivation to start writing even though the process of doing so would feel effortless. I also noticed needing more space to think through posts while juggling other life commitments. I felt bad for not always having time or energy to read other people’s posts as interesting as they are. I thus experimented with a biweekly schedule.
I was initially worried about whether this would break up the momentum I had built. But on the contrary, I noticed the gap supported my process. It is now 6 months since I have launched the newsletter and I am still going! Few readers seemed to prefer more gaps between my posts so that they could have time to think through my posts and questions. It further gave me time to read and comment on other people’s newsletters, whether or not they are my readers. I also noticed that I would have more time to properly research my topics instead of rushing through them.
I have thus decided that I won’t be going back to a weekly posting schedule. I will use my holiday to decide on if I want to stick to my biweekly schedule or to go for a monthly one instead. I will update you on this in my next post on August 30th.
Slowing down seems to help me better connect with myself and with what I am writing about. While I have mostly heard people talk about belonging as being about connecting with groups of people and with places, I have also at times heard people talk about it as connecting with oneself. Prasanta’s post mentions belonging both from the angle of what actions she will take to better connect with herself in the summer as well as what it means to her to belong as an American of South Asian descent.
The idea of connecting to oneself as being part of what it means to belong makes sense to me because it can be difficult to meaningfully connect with other people without meaningfully connecting with yourself. However, the opposite can be true at the same time too.
In his book, “Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community,” social psychologist Kenneth Gergen argues that our very notion of us even experiencing having a “self” is not possible without relationships. He argues that our thoughts, feelings, values, behaviors, how we relate to ourselves, and how we make meaning of the world are all constantly being co-constructed within relationships whether past or present.
Psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has written a book I plan on reading called “How Are Emotions Made: The Secret Life of the Brain” where she too touches upon how our emotions are socially constructed and how culture interacts with our brains and bodies.
I recall from a course I took on meditation and psychotherapy how Buddhist philosophy claims that even consciousness itself cannot arise without the existence of something to be conscious about. This mirrors the claims of some secular Western philosophers such as Heidegger who proposed that consciousness is always consciousness about something. Thus our notion of ourselves and even our consciousness are both relational in that they arise within relationships and never on their own.
This all has me think that belonging is intertwined with connecting with oneself. What most drew me to Prasanta’s post is how she asks herself “how can I belong this summer?” rather than “how will I spend my time this summer?” or “how will I relax this summer?” I found this question particularly refreshing as it focuses on connecting rather than productivity or consumption which I admit is a trap I can easily fall into as many of us do within global capitalism.
I have a question for readers before I continue. You may reply privately over email or publicly via clicking on the comment button below:
After reading Prasanta’s post, how would you answer her question? How can you belong in the upcoming last month of summer?
Here’s how I would answer the above question:
I would like to return to a consistent meditative practice. While I practice informally in brief passing moments while walking or after prayer, I would like to go back to more daily formal practice. I have noticed how it impacts my connection with myself and how I show up in my relationships more fully and more anchored and even how I connect with the plants in my garden.
I would like to spend more time with friends in a meaningful way. I would prefer we learn new things together or do activities that can reconnect us to our inner child (like laser tag and go karts among many examples) rather than eating out and having coffee. I find that as adults we often take ourselves too seriously which leaves me feeling disconnected. Letting go with someone can be so intimate. I was thinking of booking a private room in a library that is close to both of us so we can create together or play board games. As much as I would like to invite them over, I also recognize how my family whom I live with comes from a culture that goes out of their way to show hospitality and I don’t want to burden them.
I could try going back to writing my people watching poems which I mentioned about in an older post that you can read by clicking here. I noticed how it helps me feel better connected to a place and to a larger humanity while slowing down my thinking.
I am open to scheduling Zoom or Google Meet calls with readers to connect with you more! I have so far had 2 and would love to have more! We can do audio only calls if you are not comfortable with video. Feel free to privately reply to this email if you are interested in chatting.
These are only intentions and I may not live up to all of them for this month. But I hope that I can at least stay close to that question and find even small acts of “belonging” in my day to day; small acts of how I can slow down, however brief, to connect better with people, myself, and the world around me.
The next newsletter will be posted on August 30 and I hope to reflect on Rana AlMutawa’s book called “Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai.”
Before I wrap up…
I am ending each of my posts with a randomly drawn conversational card that you can consider using to deepen your conversations with people this week. So here’s today’s card drawn from a deck called Scenario Cards:
“What if you could time travel to any period in the past or future? What period would you travel to?”
Let me know if you end up using this question in any of your conversations and how it goes!
Click the link here to learn more about Scenario Cards. I currently earn an affiliate fee for every purchase from this link. This is so far the first affiliate partnership I have and I only plan to do so with products I genuinely benefited from. I had previously written a post about conversational cards in general prior to being invited to Scenario Cards’ affiliate program. Click here for the link to the post.
I would like to pick up a point you already touched upon that in almost all middle and far east's though , philosophies , and religions the sharp extinction between the subject and object that characterize the western thought doesn't exist , on the contrary we experience the sameness and even the oneness of these two poles , as consequences I claim that the eastern have deeper belonging to nature , places , and people ,
in the Buddhism , Shinto , Hindu , and even the Abrahamic religions we find that deep appreciation to the nature and to others , all of them are innocent of - I think -the greedy and never ending quest to control nature Lunched in the western classic ages and reached its peak in the modern times until it extended from nature to the other as something to be manipulated and controlled , until recently some thinkers stand out against these trends and tendencies
the eastern wisdom always has the preoccupation of how one lives in harmony with nature and others rather than to study them as separate entities exist out there , in this respect it really has a great deal to teach us the themes of connecting and belonging