October 19, 2010

What's Love Got To Do With It?



I am just finishing reading Slow Love-How I lost my job, Put on my pajamas & Found happiness by Dominique Browning. I have been savoring each page, and I'm sad to have it come to an end.

Dominique is in her fifties and lost her job as editor of House & Garden when the magazine folded at the end of 2007.  Like so many people lately, she was suddenly out of work. At the same time her children had left home, and she ended a long love affair, as well as sold the home that she thought she would live in forever.

Having lost my knitwear design job after sixteen years in 2007, I can relate to suddenly losing the main thing that she so accurately says “defined her days, paced and regulated her life.” She had feared losing it for many years, and when it happened, it nearly flattened her. With the busyness of her work gone, she was left with plenty of time to think about life, which she writes about with bold honesty and humor. It is like reading someone’s diary.

I especially like her quote of Adam Nicolson’s from Sea Room:

“At the back of that hurry is the knowledge that it is a screen against honesty.”   

That is one powerful sentence.

Slow Love is about living life more slowly. As Dominique says, it is “the love that comes of an unhurried and focused attention to the simplest things, available to all of us, at any time, should we choose to engage…..Perhaps even importantly, slow love comes out of the quiet hours, out of learning from the silence that is always there when we want it.”

Slow Love is about finding peace. It's a great read.

Below is an interview with Dominique on CNN about Slow Love, which might be especially interesting to any of you who have lost your job, or are close to someone who has.