Several years ago I was given the opportunity to spend the summer in Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. It is a tiny country, about 6700 sq miles, with a population of about 1.1 million. I know what you are thinking, why on earth are we talking about a country in southern Africa on a homesteading blog. Well, honestly because I can Jand because while I didn’t know it then, this small country is a huge part of why we are homesteading today.
You see, in the zulu language, Wahamba nathi, means “you walked with us”. It’s a popular praise song that we heard and sang often while in Eswatini. When I was preparing to leave for Eswatini, I was working a 12 hour job, finishing up from being in school full time as a paramedic, had just finished my master’s degree from Liberty and was fully involved in multiple activities outside of work and school. I was BUSY. If you saw me, you would notice my walk was near jogging, in just my everyday life. I lived fast, and I was good at my job and at school because I was able to function at such speed, but being good at something doesn’t mean that you are happy doing it. Going to Eswatini was like watching my high-speed life, hit a wall at 80 mph. Most people don’t walk away from that kind of accident and if they do, they make changes to the way they live.
I learned two very important life lessons while I was there. Both of which still permeate my life on a daily basis. The first while I am sure we will discuss another day was to learn to live vulnerable. This was by far the hardest lesson I have ever learned and is a phrase that I wear on a bracelet now as a reminder. You can never meet people where they are in life, if you are not willing to first live your life vulnerably. But as I said, we can discuss that another day. The second life lesson was learning to walk slowly.
Homesteading is my ultimate act in learning to walk slowly. I promised myself when I got off the plane from South Africa that I would be more intentional with the way I lived my life: to meet people where they are and if that act slowed my life down, to take the time with them. In the U.S. we find ourselves irritated with the car that drives the speed limit, or the elderly that walk slower in the grocery store. We find that if our whole day is not planned from sunrise to sundown we are missing out on something. We have even created an acronym to describe this: FOMO, the fear of missing out.
What if what we are truly missing out on is the people, not the events. I started small at first. Finding a job that didn’t require me to work so many hours away from my husband. Gardening on the weekends and taking up jogging to spend time with him doing something that he loved. But it didn’t take long for the culture that I had come back to, to slowly creep itself back into my every day life. Soon I found myself fighting the desire to climb the corporate ladder, while also trying to be an old school southern wife. I would try to bake from scratch, can, and freeze things on the weekend while bringing work home to do at night. It even crept into our vacations, where I found myself on a conference call, while in the waiting area to board a cruise.
While there are many factors that played into our ultimate decision of slowing down our lives and farming, the intentional act of walking slowly was one of them. I see the benefits daily as I am out and about talking with local business owners or random people in stores. Even today as I walked the aisles of Wal-Mart, I struck up a conversation with a lady regarding my larger than normal purchase of floating soap. It is good to be a part of a community, without always being in a hurry. It is freeing to not have every moment of every day planned out.
Even as the summer is coming to a close, I love to fill my basket with produce to deliver to our neighbors and customers. The farm, the animals, the people are all an act of intentionally learning to walk slowly in my life. Yes, there are going to be days where we are busy, where we have to pick up the pace, but that should never be our every day speed. If you never stop to smell the flowers or watch the sunset, how will you ever be able to appreciate how blessed you are to be living the life you have been granted. We only get one shot at this life and there is so much joy knowing that we walked with people through it.So my challenge to you is to walk just a little slower today. Sit a little longer at the café and read a book or have a conversation. Take a walk through the park and enjoy the changing of the leaves. Sit in the front porch swing, sipping ice tea and watch the sunset. Whatever you choose to do, slow your life down intentionally. You won’t regret it. Until our next adventure, “wahamba nathi, siyabonga Jesu” that is to say “you walked with us, thank you Jesus”.