Slow Life/Soft Life: What Does it Mean & How Can We Start Living It?

Every other day a new trend drops on how we should all be living our lives. The one I’m seeing everywhere as of late is the call to live a “soft life”. It’s nice to see people enjoying simpler moments, celebrating the art of slowing down, the art of presence. But a “soft life” is not bereft of hard moments. A “slow life” is not lacking in the ups and downs, the rollercoaster of life’s unpredictability that doesn’t stop just because we proclaim to live “slowly”.

Creating a soft life is not about controlling the outside, the material, the things you can buy and hold and touch. It is about cultivating the internal. It is about curating a healthier mindset, it is about facing the shadows and darkness that exists within, instead of avoiding them with distractions and things and empty relationships.

To live softly means to have confronted the parts within us that cling so desperately to hardness, to fear, to apathy and cynicism. It means facing the unhealed wounds inside of us and acknowledging the areas we are projecting onto others, the areas in which we begin to close our hearts and “harden” ourselves to the world and its people. It means acknowledging where and how we decided to stop being open-hearted and caring and chose the path of cynicism instead.