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For the past few weeks, I’ve woken up to rain beating a tattoo on my windowsill and cinnamon-laced coffee perfuming my kitchen. This is highly unusual for a New Mexico autumn (we often take it sunny and dry). I’m not complaining. The universe has given us a late and abundant monsoon season, refilling the Rio Grande and cooling our desert city after the oppressive heat of summer. These rains remind me of the monsoons of my childhood, when clouds rolled across the sky in the late afternoons and gave the desert life. In New Mexico, across the many mestizaje and Indigenous cultures that have made our lives in this desert, rain has always been a blessing. I’ve never felt that more than after a summer of high temperatures and little moisture to cool things off. There’s nothing quite like desert rain. It just hits different. I say this after years of living in Seattle for graduate school, where the rain and darkness could get to a person after a while, eating at your soul like mold on the floorboards. But in the desert? Rain is a gift. Something to relish and celebrate. Sometimes, of course, it’s also a little terrifying. I haven’t forgotten the flooding down south, or the way the same rainfall that gives life can become dangerous when too much arrives at once. We aren’t strangers to duality here in the desert Southwest. The landscape teaches it constantly: abundance and scarcity, beauty and danger, blistering sun and sudden rain. You learn to hold two things at once. Still, I feel washed clean, like my city, by these late-season monsoons. I’ve basked in the cozy gloom that the rain has brought, drinking mugs of apple-spice chamomile tea and simmering stew. I celebrated the day it was finally cool enough for a sweater. I have gleefully festooned my home with pumpkins, fall leaves, and other whimsical decorations that serve no purpose whatsoever except to delight me and those I love. I’m increasingly convinced that delight is reason enough. That can be surprisingly difficult to remember. When I was younger, I was all about the hustle. I liked working hard. I liked accomplishing things. I liked the next goal, the next deadline, the next gold star. If I’m being honest, I still enjoy a gold star. It’s so shiny! But these days, I’m coming to terms with the fact that work has limits—or, perhaps more accurately, that I do. This is especially true in a post-pandemic world where my job requires so much more of me at a time when I want so much more from life. There will always be another teaching task I could complete. Another email I could answer. Another deadline I could meet. Another essay I could polish. I also can’t write as much as I would like to, though I’ve started throwing caution to the wind and writing a little each morning before work overtakes the day. Still, this idea of always hustling has lost its appeal. I think that’s why the phrase “slow creator” has been particularly soothing to me as I ease into fall. I like the idea of being someone who still makes things, and cares deeply about making them, but doesn’t demand that creativity run like a factory. Someone who lets things marinate as part of the creative process. Someone who trusts that there are seasons of abundance and seasons when the soil needs to rest. Someone who occasionally posts a newsletter late and doesn’t fret (too much) about consistent posting. Someone who knows that inspiration is a mercurial thing. Yes, sometimes it meets you at your desk because you’ve consistently shown up to write. But sometimes it sneaks up on you while you’re buying groceries, folding clothes, paying bills, or doing any of the ordinary things that supposedly have nothing to do with writing. That’s how the best things happen in life too: moments of connection in a coffee shop on the way to work, bumping into a loved one running errands, an unexpected pocket of free time that allows you to take in the turning leaves…and have an epiphany that colors the way you look at the world moving forward. It’s got me thinking that maybe good writing—and good living—need some room we haven’t already accounted for. In other words, good writing and good living aren’t always things you can control. In fact, the best stuff comes when you’re in a flow state. It’s not the best writing advice (probably better living advice), but it’s the truth. At least for me. It’s better to flow. Pay attention to the daily delights life offers. And let go of any expectation of how things should unfold. I often feel that the desert has been trying to teach me this my entire life, but I’ve been too busy answering emails to notice: Life keeps moving even when it doesn’t feel like it. Things bloom here when the conditions are right—and we often don’t know when that is until it happens. The rains come when they come. Sometimes they even come late, when you’ve given up hope of a monsoon season altogether. And we receive them with gratitude. When I was younger, I thought a good life was something you built through enough effort and achievement. Work hard enough. Keep going. Get the degree. Meet the deadline. Earn the next gold star. Now I’m realizing there are more important things than the next gold star. That makes me a late bloomer, I know. But better late than never. Because maybe being a slow creator is part of a larger lesson: not everything meaningful responds to hustle. Some things simply can’t be hurried. Creativity certainly can’t. Neither can friendship, tending to family, making a home, or building a life. Hustling can crowd these things out before they’ve had the chance to bloom. The older I get, the more interested I am in giving my time to what—and who—I love rather than giving all of it to what I can accomplish. And maybe that’s what slowing down really means. Not doing nothing. Not abandoning ambition or caring less about the work that matters to us. Just remembering that our lives contain things that cannot be measured in completed tasks. A long conversation. Dinner around a table. Making green chile stew on a chilly day. Reading a book for no reason except that you want to know what happens next—and gossip about it with your family (voracious readers, the lot of us!). Going outside because the sky has opened over the desert and, for once, you have the good sense to stop what you’re doing and watch. Maybe even dance in the rain. Right now, I’m wrapping up this post because there is a family birthday to celebrate. There will be food and cake and candles. There will be conversation and laughter and all the small rituals through which we tell another person: We’re glad you’re here. We’re glad we’re here. Together. When I was younger, I probably would have tried to squeeze in one more task first. Now? The work can wait. There will always be another teaching task. There will always be something I wish I had written faster. There will always be another little gold star hovering somewhere in the distance. But this particular evening won’t come again. Neither will this particular autumn. These late rains are a gift I intend to enjoy. The strange thing about noticing what won’t come again is that sometimes, life surprises us with what does. Things you think are done and gone sometimes come back to you in surprising ways. The monsoon season was supposed to be over. Summer had already begun giving way to fall. And still, the clouds rolled in. Still, the rain came. Not everything important arrives according to schedule. Not a book. Not a season. A life certainly doesn’t. Maybe our job isn’t always to hurry everything along. Maybe sometimes our job is simply to notice when something good arrives. So this autumn, I’m trying to leave a little more room for the things that don’t fit neatly on a to-do list. For the delicious soup and the sweater excitement and the ridiculous little pumpkin on the mantel. For sitting at the table after dinner is finished. For letting an essay or story take longer to wrap up than I wanted. There will always be another task waiting for me. There will always be things I want that aren’t here yet. But I don’t want to spend so much time looking toward what might come next that I miss what is already here. The rain is here now. I’d rather go dance in it. After the birthday party, of course.
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