The slow road

A Fire Horse year, reframed

☝️ Lots of fun, new little experiments coming your way, including the return of article voiceovers, read by ME, the writer (not by AI). If you enjoy listening to these posts do let me know!

Collage by me with open source imagery from Public Domain

This is a year of the Fire Horse, and when I first heard that, I pictured what you probably did too: sparks, speed, burning energy. A horse galloping toward newness and opportunity.

My year has not felt like that one bit.

But then, in a beautiful tarot reading by one of my mentors (Rachel Reid Wilkie), I was introduced to the Arabian horse. Everything reframed: my Fire Horse is a different breed.

The Arabian horse is unique. It has a remarkable ability to retain hydration, and while it can certainly run very fast, it can also pace itself at a slow trot without fatigue — built for endurance, for the long, fiery crossings of desert terrain. Its power lives in a pace that’s deliberate and sustaining, and that symbolism is exactly where I found my theme for this year.

The slow road

As a freelancer and solopreneur, I've written before about slow seasons: quieter inboxes, smaller projects, tiny sabbaticals, or even creative stagnation where there used to be a lot more energy running through your work. That's all slowness happening to us, but what about when we choose it? Most of the time, choosing slowness means recognizing that we're in a transition that needs more spaciousness than we've been giving it.

Permission slips for slow time

I’m in a practice of observing how much creative and energetic capacity can shift over time — both throughout our annual seasons and throughout the different stages of our lives. We rarely give ourselves permission to acknowledge that honestly, let alone share it, because there’s so much pressure to show up creative and productive and visibly doing things, always. And now, with this inhuman AI working at almost unfathomable speed, that pressure has become even more palpable…to do it all, and to do it faster.

I don’t have the capacity for speed right now, especially in this hot dessert — we’re burning out here! Slowness is showing up everywhere for me: in the conditions under which I do my best thinking, the amount of time and space an idea needs before it grows into something ripe for the picking, the amount of rest I need (which is always more than I think).

Working honestly with your actual capacity turns out to be one of the more quietly radical things you can do as someone running their own business. Back when I was teaching my course, Designing Your Freelance Business, we spent real time on being intentional with how you design your time, and these questions are worth returning to whenever capacity shifts:

• What is working, what is not?

• What does it mean to be sustainable, for you specifically?

• What’s important for you to feel in your schedule?

• How do you structure your client work?

• What kind of breaks do you need?

• What rituals can support you in both work and life?

As someone who has always thought of themselves as a doer, a maker, an action taker, my biggest lesson this year has been in learning to see slowness as a friend rather than foe. I’ve been meditating on all the good that slowness can and does bring into our lives, and reminding myself that slow time is still time — and the road is still a path forward even when you’re moving through it at a trot. You actually see more from that pace, and the things you notice tend to matter in ways you couldn’t have caught from a gallop.

“The slow road is still moving. And in fact, you actually see more of it.”

I’d love to explore this theme of slowness together. For those who are needing this pace too, I think there’s something really valuable in being in it alongside each other — so we don’t get caught up in that creeping feeling that we’re behind in the “race.”

So I’m introducing a new patron-level membership tier:

Collage by me, with open source imagery from Public Domain

🐌 Nice & Slow

A slower kind of support: working toward our dreams without the pressure to sprint.

In lieu of teaching courses again, this is for the folks who want to help keep Freelance for Life sustainable — and in return, receive a more intimate, tangible, and live kind of care.

Here’s what’s included:

• Nice & Slow Sessions (monthly): open, unrushed co-working time. Bring something you’d like to work on slowly and we’ll do it in good company!

• Seasonal Ritual Gatherings (Quarterly Zooms): a space to notice how our pace and rituals are changing through the year, plus simple creative templates to support you (I really miss the energy of those Freelance for Life retrospective gatherings, and I’m bringing them back in this form)

• Care Packages: sent via snail mail, physical packages of small delights to honor the things that move slower, and to help us connect with the nicer side of slowness

If you want to take things Nice & Slow — and be a supporting patron of this work — you can join anytime by upgrading your subscription.

More soon. Slowly.

Sarah