251: Waiting on a cup of coffee

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I love me a good cup of coffee.

I spent the late spring and all of summer 2023 sucked into an ultra busy, away-from-home life that included an almost daily frothy and sugary mocha concoction from the local Caribou Coffee as I buzzed my way through the work day.

But truth be told my favorite coffee is Cabin Coffee. That’s the coffee we drink at the off grid cabin way up north. It’s a process to make a pot of Cabin Coffee. Pouring water from a five gallon jug we brought from home (because the cabin well is usually dry), and then waiting on the coffee to percolate and then settle all takes a lot longer than any drive thru line I’ve ever sat in.

While I was waiting on a pot of Cabin Coffee just a couple weeks ago, I found myself thinking about simplicity and priorities and how life was very different back when your only option was to wait awhile for a cup of coffee.

In the summer of 2022, I got a part time job working outside the home and farm for the first time in 20 years. In late spring of 2023, I switched to full time hours at that job. And in the beginning I could handle it all: the 1940s fantasy farm life I lived and my own writing business and a full time job. I could do it!

Or at least fake that I could. But I went into a tailspin that literally everyone else in my life could sense but I was blind to until September when I did what we’re just gonna say was a very ugly crash and burn.

So why did I switch to full time hours? A therapist would probably say I’m an overachiever who is bad at math and doesn’t see the value in any of the things I personally create or do. A therapist would probably also say that I have guilt for not “needing” to live the mainstream go go go work yourself to the bone for someone else life and therefore in some sadistic way, placed myself in that full-time position in a weird kind of “we’re in this together, buddy!” kind of thing. It’s fine! I can do it all. That’s the thing now, right? I just need better time management. We can do it all, ladies! 

Except doing it all really depends on what your “all” means. Because raising a barn full of animals for food and growing a huge garden for food doesn’t mean anything if what you’re actually eating is gas station pizza every night after work because there isn’t time for anything else.

I really do suck at math, but I have learned enough to realize I can’t fit 45-50 hours a week away from home into a life that was built to honor home and family in a very specific way.

And — plot twist — I stayed home to raise and homeschool kids, but discovered what I was really doing was raising a family and building a life. And that family and life doesn’t end when the kids grow up and move on, as mainstream would like to have us belief.

What if the kids grow up and you still want to keep building that home and that life?

Were we collecting eggs and brining our own bacon and growing cabbages and making bread and processing chickens because there were kids at home, or were we doing all that because that’s the way we wanted to live?

Is life different on the farm now that our kids are adults with their own lives? Yep. Does that mean our life was then supposed to do such a hard 180 that I questioned why we even had animals in the barn, and cried when I realized it had been so long since I’d baked that my yeast and my flour had gone bad?

Rosie the Riveter is fun sometimes, and I can absolutely do it if we were in a situation where it was necessary. But the last six months have proven to me that I have the blood of a 1940s farmwife running through my veins (sprinkled with a whole lot of you can’t tell me what to do) and I think the world works best when people can be exactly who they’re meant to be.

I kept the job (for now) but cut the hours by more than half. Because there is bread to bake and grapes to mash and a garden to clean out. There are meals to make and people to care for and a life to live. The kind of life that brings a satisfaction at the end of the day, a wholeness, and the feeling like I moved forward in my quest to all the things that actually matter.

Or maybe I just went back to what actually matters. People that I love, things that I love, a life I was intentional about creating—not to mention this little thing called A Farmish Kind of Life and everything that goes with it: the learning, the fun, the community.

And you know what? People have time to figure stuff like this out when they have to wait for a pot of coffee on the stove.

When we are too busy and move too fast, we don’t have time to think. We skip from thing to thing to thing. We grasp at anything that seems it might be a solution but we feel empty. We’re dissatisfied. That comes from spending all our energy chasing someone else’s dream. That comes from looking in the wrong places for whatever we seek. That comes from ignoring everything we already have. Everything we’ve already built. 

I thought a full time job would give me new worth and importance and peace about who I really was. It didn’t give me any of that, because I already had it in a completely different place in life.

I wanted to start a new Lifesteaders website and podcast and the whole ball of wax because I thought it would be new and exciting and glittery and different than what I already had. But when I started the social medias/groups for The Lifesteaders, most people who joined still talked about homesteading (or how something related to their life as a homesteader) because that was the vibe of the group and that is the vibe I bring to everything and that was the life they were living.

So, why would I start and build something new (which, by the way, is much harder to do in 2023 than it was in 2009) when we’ve already been talking about “farm stuff and not farm stuff” for years here at A Farmish Kind of Life?

A couple months ago in episode 250, I made the analogy of wanting to “move to a new house”. But as a good friend told me, sometimes you realize you didn’t need to move. You just needed a new coat of paint in the living room you were already in.

I hope you have a good, slow cup of coffee and take time to think about life, what you want, where you’re headed, what fits, what things you’re taking on that are actually escapism, what things you need to give yourself credit for, and what actually makes you happy.

Enjoy your coffee.

— Amy Dingmann, 10-2-23

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