Essays From West of 98: Tireless Slowness

Recognizing and embracing our inability to do it all

Welcome to new readers and subscribers to West of 98! Once a month, I write a newsletter called The Prairie Panicle, which rounds up the last month’s writing and my read/listen/watch recommendations. You can read the latest edition here.

Next week, I intend to release my work on the future of the USDA and American farm policy. The reason for the timing will become apparent when it is published.

Ron Swanson giving Leslie Knope advice on the perils of multitasking in the “Sweet Sixteen” episode of Parks and Recreation

Editor’s note: the following essay and the audio voiceover includes a mild but humorously intended profanity.

There’s a great scene in the fourth season of “Parks and Recreation.” Pawnee’s star parks employee Leslie Knope is running for City Council and she is struggling to manage her campaign while also keeping up her day job and the variety of other activities that comprise her life. Her boss, the great Ron Swanson, encourages her to take a sabbatical from the parks job. She is initially resistant. She is far too much of a dedicated workaholic to agree to an idea like that. Later in the episode, even she realizes that she can’t do it all. It culminates with a lakeside conversation in which Ron gives her some amazing advice based on his own life experience:

Ron: “I used to work in a sheet metal factory, but then a job came along at the tannery. The hours were better, and I would get paid. Also I'd have the chance to work with leather both before and after it was on the cow, which had always been a dream of mine. I didn't want to give up my sheet metal job, so I tried to do both jobs and finish middle school.”

Leslie: “How old were you?”

Ron: “11. The point is, I was so tired, I tried to puncture an eight-gauge aluminum foil with a leather awl. I learned a lesson. Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”

We could all learn from that. “Multitasking” is a familiar word to many of us. Sometimes it is a necessity in life. The simultaneous experiences of family, professional, and community life do not always allow us to simply manage one task at a time, in turn. That’s okay! But multitasking can also become perilous, as Leslie Knope experienced, when you start doing too many things but you fail to do any of them well.

My friend Kyle Childress is a Stamford native who has pastored a church in Nacogdoches for almost four decades. He and I connected through my writing at West of 98 and our friendship has become a good and thoughtful one over several years. A while back, I wrote an essay about our “microwave” society and the negative impacts of that mentality. Kyle wrote to me to share his experience of preaching about a “slow church.” He shared:

“[this] mostly had to do with learning to take time and attend to God, one another, and creation, and to slow down and listen…Early on I learned that one of the things I had to be careful about is that often people heard me equating slowness or slow church as equivalent to laziness.”

Such is the peril of NOT multitasking. If you slow it all down, there’s a fear that you will be seen as lazy. Even if others do not see you that way, you still criticize yourself. Society has taught us that slowness is bad. It’s unproductive. It does not contribute properly to The GDP and The Economy.

Several months ago, I wrote a significant mental health essay. In it, I shared of my decision to sell my title company that I owned for the last decade. I shared that I simply had to jettison something in life, because I could not meet all my obligations satisfactorily. Leslie Knope was half-assing two things in her situation that begins this essay, but I felt like I was doing that to more than two things. It is not particularly pleasant to feel like no matter which way you turn, something is not getting done and someone is getting mad at you about it, and even if they aren’t mad at you, they probably have the right to be.

I officially sold the title company on January 1. I’m still completing some “wind-down” tasks that are required in that process, so it is not fully off my plate yet, but I have reflected a good bit on what these means now and for the future. When Kyle wrote me back in 2023, he observed that Wendell Berry is a slow farmer, but “slow” is anything but lazy. He works hard when it is time to work, but he does not allow work to overrun important priorities like sitting on the porch or spending time with family and friends. Kyle shared with me the final stanza of the poem “Amish Economy” as a lesson from Wendell in that regard:

But now, in summer dusk, a man

Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns

Sits under the yard trees, at rest,

His smallest daughter on his lap.

This is because he rose at dawn,

Cared for his own, helped his neighbors,

Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.

I’ve got more to say about this topic, but that is for another day. Right now, I am working my way into a phase of living more slowly. I was drowning in paperwork that, no matter how hard I tried, I simply could not do it and all the other things in my life satisfactorily. I am eager to work hard and tirelessly on the matters for which I am called to devote my full mental capacity and energy. I am going to whole ass those things, not half ass them. And by doing that, like the farmer of the Amish Economy, I will keep my peace.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.