Pacing
The last attribute I want to talk about is
pacing. In the last five years, I've noticed that all city
slickers (myself included) have a tendency to dive into physical labor
with two feet and wear themselves out after ten minutes or an
hour. It's easy to pick out folks used to physical labor because
they start slowly, take frequent breaks, and can keep going all day
long. In the process, those well-paced farmers get about ten
times the amount of work done as the eager beaver city-slicker did.
Pacing is also important on the larger scale. I
have a bad tendency to want to start 
so many projects at once that
we'd have to work fifteen hour days, seven days a week to get it all
done. It took Mark a long time to convince me that it's really
okay to take weekends off. When he did, I started to realize that
I was more efficient during the week after my two days of relaxation.
A long term plan is also very useful in helping with pacing. Make
a list of all of the dreams you have for the land, guesstimate how much
time each one will take to complete, then scatter them across the next
decade. After all, didn't you want to move back to the land to
escape the rat race and enjoy the outdoors? Once you move to the
land, you'll have the rest of your life to achieve your goals, so treat
homesteading like a marathon, not a sprint. Stop and smell the
flowers!
| This post is part of our Homesteading Qualities lunchtime series.
Read all of the entries: |
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.