At ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning I caught myself standing in the kitchen with a dish towel over my shoulder, listening. Nothing was happening. Lila was at school, first grade having started the week before. Ben was out on a survey job somewhere past Bowman. Pepper was asleep in the hall where the air from the vent hits the floor. The house was so quiet I could hear the ice maker drop a few cubes. And for the first time since January, the quiet did not make me nervous.
I left my job as a library assistant in Columbia in January, after eight years. I want to write about the months since, honestly, because I have read a lot of cheerful essays about slowing down, and mine did not go the way those do.
Why I left
The short version is the drive and the hours. When we moved to Orangeburg in 2021, I kept the job and commuted, about an hour each way. For a while it worked. Then it slowly stopped working: evening shifts that meant missing Lila's bedtime, a car that started making expensive noises, and the feeling that my days belonged to the interstate.
So I left. I picked up remote bookkeeping for two small local businesses, which I had been doing on the side, and I started writing here. The plan was simple. The adjustment was not.
The first months were not restful
I had imagined I would feel lighter immediately. Instead, for the first few months, I felt strangely guilty. I kept checking the clock at the times my breaks used to be. I filled every empty hour with something useful, like scrubbing grout or reorganizing the pantry, because an unscheduled hour felt like something I had to account for.
I also missed the library itself, more than I expected. I missed the regulars: the retired man who read every Western we owned and returned them in perfect order, the teenagers who came in after school and pretended not to be doing homework, the smell of the book drop on a rainy morning. Work gives you people without your having to arrange them. At home, you have to go find them.
Nobody tells you that slowing down is a skill. You are not handed it the day you leave a job. You learn it badly, then a little better.
What slowly helped
None of these were big changes. They piled up over spring and summer.
- A loose shape to the day. Not a schedule, exactly. Mornings for bookkeeping and writing, afternoons for the house and errands, evenings for family. Having a shape kept the hours from feeling shapeless, which is what had made me anxious.
- Walking with Pepper. She is old and slow now, and her pace became mine. A loop around the block at beagle speed takes twenty-five minutes and involves a great deal of sniffing mailboxes.
- Saying yes to small invitations. Coffee with a neighbor. Helping at Lila's school book fair in the spring, which was a little bit like being back at the circulation desk.
- Keeping the library close. I am at our county branch every week now as a patron, and I volunteer occasionally. It is a different relationship with the place, and a nice one.
- Letting the useless hour be useless. This took the longest. Sitting on the porch with tea and not reading, not planning, just watching the light move through the pecans.
What it costs
It would be dishonest to leave money out of this. My library paycheck was not large, and my bookkeeping work brings in less. We trimmed. We cook almost everything at home, we put off a couple of house projects, and I have become very interested in why our summer electric bills are so high, which will probably be a post of its own soon. We had a free energy audit in May and some duct work done in July, and I am waiting to see whether it helps.
The tradeoff has been worth it for us, but I know that not everyone can make it, and I do not think less of anyone who keeps the long commute. I kept it for four years.
Eight months in, I would not call myself a naturally slow person. I still make lists. I still feel a flicker of guilt at two in the afternoon on a weekday if I am sitting down. But the flicker is smaller.
The thing I like most is being there for the in-between parts of the day. I am at the end of the driveway when the school bus pulls up. I see Lila's face before she has had time to rearrange it, whether the day was good or hard. Yesterday it was good. She ran up the driveway shouting that she had been picked to feed the class fish, and I was there to hear it the first time, instead of the third time at nine at night when the story had worn thin.
That is not a small thing. It might be the whole point.
