Show notes
Walking is good for us, but it takes a while — it’s not the most efficient mode of transportation. But it’s not about efficiency; that’s not the point. What about the other stuff in our life that can benefit from slowness? Seth and Tsh talk about being slow to reply, slow to respond, and slow to assume, and how we all need to do more of it.Seth: Newsletter | Twitter | Instagram | WebsiteTsh: Newsletter | Twitter | Instagram | WebsiteSupport the show — buy the next round of drinks!Subscribe to the show’s SubstackFind all the episodesTsh’s Rule of Life workshopAncient Nutrition Bone BrothMark Sparrow’s tweet@findinginterestingpeopleAtlas Obscura PodcastScroll down for the transcriptTsh: This is A Drink With a Friend, I’m Tsh Oxenreider.Seth: And I’m Seth Haines.Tsh: Seth, what are you drinking this afternoon? Seth: Have you ever heard of Ancient Nutrition?Tsh: No. I’ve heard of those two words. Seth: The brand Ancient Nutrition. Yes, you know ancient and you know nutrition. The is a brand called Ancient Nutrition and they make bone broth. Powdered bone broth. Tsh: Oh yeah.Seth: Today, I was noticing I was a little low on my protein intake which is to say a lot low. I need a lot of protein. I went to Ozark Natural Foods which is our local co-op, our local Whole Foods competitor. I try to go there any time I can instead of Whole Foods. I picked up a packet of Ancient Nutrition Chocolate Bone Broth that tastes amazing! Tsh: Okay! This comes full circle to a few episodes ago when you talked about anything chocolate and healthy is terrible. Seth: I know. Someone on A Drink With a Friend that sponsors the drinks has recommended some things which I have not gotten around to trying but in preparation for today while I was at ONF looking for high protein foods, I saw this and it was chocolate flavored and it was $3 and it had 20 grams of protein, less than sugar, very few carbs. I thought I’m going to try this and while I drink it on the air I’m going to report to the people about whether it’s good or terrible as all healthful chocolate things are terrible, this is kind of amazing. Tsh: Nice. I’m literally looking it up right now.Seth: I mixed it in, it recommends 12 ounces, it would probably be better, but I mixed it in 16 ounces of hot water. It would be super amazing in hot cashew milk or almond milk. Tsh: That’s great to know because bone broth drinks are expensive so to me, $3 is not that bad. Seth: Well, for a packet. I use it as a meal supplement so I think the bigger tub of it is quite expensive but still amazing. If you use it as a snack or a supplement, I highly recommend it.Tsh: Very cool.Seth: I’m assuming I know what you’re drinking because you texted me before we went on that you were running a few minutes late because you were making your drink which is…Tsh: Coffee. Black coffee. I don’t drink coffee that much when we talk because I can’t do caffeine after 2 pm but this is 1 pm so I can still do it, I’m in the window. It’s just my standard Cafe Creole Ethiopian coffee that’s just good. It’s nothing fancy but it’s really good coffee from the grocery store. I actually added a cinnamon stick because I was just reading cinnamon in the nutritional benefits so I’m just tossing it in there. I am actually testing out a theory. After we record, I’m going to take a 15-minute nap. I was just watching this YouTuber talk about the weird unknown effects of taking a power nap after drinking coffee and that it does something or other that I can’t remember and I’m going to test to see if it’s complete sh*t or if he’s telling the truth. We’ll see. I’ve never been able to take good naps but I’m desperate for some sleep. Seth: Can you report back?Tsh: I will report back. Seth: Interestingly you said, the amazing health benefits of a cinnamon stick and I don’t know what that even means. Tsh: It’s like digestion, mental clarity, and what is that called? The bio-gut stuff. Whatever that’s called. It promotes healthy bacteria growth, the good bacteria and not the bad bacteria. That is a very scientific way of explaining what I just said. Seth: That sounds pretty amazing. Maybe I need to get eat a cinnamon stick today. Tsh: Don’t do that. That’s probably toxic or something. We are not doctors. Seth: Yes, that’s right.Tsh: We’re kicking off, I don’t know if you want to call this a series because they’re basically not non-sequiturs so in my mind they are kind of a series. This week and next week, we’re going to talk about these two ideas we’ve had on our minds. Today, what’s been on my mind because it’s been on my mind all week, is this idea of slow. This is not new. I’ve talked about slow and moving slowly through life frequently in many different places so I’m kind of reinventing the wheel here except I want to talk about it in a slightly different way. The thing that’s got me thinking about this is my current workout routine. I’ve been walking about six miles a day for the past seventeen days. Today’s my eighteenth day of walking six miles a day. Seth: Wow, that’s amazing. How long does that take you to walk? Tsh: Believe it or not, not as much as you think. Here’s the thing, I don’t do it in one sitting. I do it all throughout the day. I’m very grateful to live in a very walkable neighborhood. I’ve made this commitment post-Lent to walk anywhere a mile or less and so I’ve just been walking everywhere. I take a morning walk, afternoon, and evening walk but then I sometimes just get up and walk around the block. It’s for mental clarity in a lot of ways but also for a lot of other health benefits. And it’s really been a net positive for me. I was doing some reading about it. We all just know walking is good for us but here’s the thing, it’s really slow, that’s a big duh, but it’s a slow form of working out and it doesn’t feel like you’re doing a lot. It feels like you’re doing the thing you’ve done since you were eighteen months old. It’s gotten me thinking about what does it look like to move slower through life. I’ve been thinking about three different ways that I think we can all move a little slower. Before I get into those three things, unpack with me a little bit, Seth, what does slow look like for you right now? Are you able to be slow at all in any capacity in your life at the moment? Seth: Yeah, in some capacities. I juggle a lot of hats from a courier perspective mostly because I’ve made now two career shifts in the last two years. One away from the practice of law and one back into the practice of law so I’ve had to juggle both of those transitions. I’m in the middle of one of those transitions right now. From a business perspective, I always feel like my hair is on fire. Everything moves so fast. The practice of law moves pretty fast anyway. The content development and coaching and book editing and writing move pretty fast, too, with the kind of work that I do in that space. My day feels pretty fast. In the last few months, I’ve really been focused on, we’ve talked about this before, I’ve been doing CrossFit now for almost a year and I’ve been focused on not just doing CrossFit but then building some endurance work on top of that that is intentionally steady state cardio which because I’m forty-three is much slower than when I was twenty-three. I have been intentionally seeking a slower rhythm and slower pace probably four to five times a week. Whether that’s by sitting on a rower and just clocking off forty-five minutes or whether that’s going on a long run to have that slower state cardio. That slow time is really helpful for me because it pulls me away from that breakneck speed and I find, actually yesterday, I had a slow row day and there was this issue I was having a hard time unlocking. Within ten minutes, I texted the answer to somebody. That slow, slowing down, being disconnected from the internet, being connected really only to yourself and your thoughts has been really helpful for me. I really have to seek it out. I am not as good at it probably as you are. I would love to hear more about your journey into slowness. But before, I have a couple of technical questions. Tsh: Okay.Seth: One, is your morning, afternoon, and evening walk for mileage?Tsh: It’s for steps officially but I also look at the mileage so I’ve got a Fitbit, our whole family has them now, actually. I wanted to track a number of things but yes, technically it is. I walk our dog most of those walks and I just keep track. I officially check for 10,000 steps a day but it roughly checks out at four to six miles a day what I end up clocking. I go for mileage.Seth: That was my second question, is how many steps is six miles?Tsh: 10,000 steps for me equal to about four miles. 15,000 steps get northward of six. The reason I’m going to switch to looking at more miles, now that I’ve got in the habit, it feels weird, eighteen days in a row of doing 10,000 plus steps, it feels normal to me. The thing I’ve thought about is everybody’s steps are different, right? Seth: Right.Tsh: My gait is a lot shorter than Kyle’s because I’m a foot shorter than him. But five miles is five miles. That’s why I’m using that as a metric more probably in the near future. Seth: Those are my two questions. Miles and steps. I think that’s good when we’re talking about slow exercise or slowness in general, but with slow exercise, I think one of the things is having a consistent metric. When I think of rowing, for instance, yesterday I rowed a 10K and it took me forty-five minutes but I’m also really long and generate a lot of leverage and so somebody who rowing next to me and rowing a 10K who might be shorter, maybe like you, would have to pull a whole lot more and so the amount of energy generated isn’t quite the same. That’s why a lot of times people will say run for time, pull for time, and row for time when you’re doing these slower cardio, steady-state cardio events. I like the idea of saying let’s pick a metric that is the [inaudible] same and do that.Tsh: Yeah, for sure. For me, one of the things I’ve noticed the past few weeks is I started off doing it for the physical health benefits but the mental health and the emotional health have been right there with it to where that’s one of the reasons why it starts feeling weird to me to not walk as much. Let’s say I get closer to 10K versus 15K, I can feel the steps. I can feel it. For me, the gains have been mostly mental because let’s face it, I’m not sore after walking six miles, it’s not hard. It really is not. But the mental clarity and the emotional clarity have been so great and here’s the reason. Our bodies release cortisol when we work out, that’s just how they do it. Women, in particular, release more cortisol than men and that’s the stress hormone. We need that stress hormone. It’s not about getting rid of cortisol but it’s about having it released at the right times or for the right reasons. Right now, I’m trying to lower my cortisol levels because I’m trying to get better sleep and I’m trying to work on my mental health, my constant monkey brain. I need to lower my cortisol levels and walking is a great way to do it because it’s one of the only forms of active working out that lower cortisol level, not elevates it. That’s why I feel like the mental and emotional benefits have been really solid for me. That’s where I want to park on because as much as we like to talk about fitness and we will continue to, I think we all can relate a little bit to thinking slower and maybe reacting a little slower to the things in our life. We’ve all been through a global pandemic and I think most of us have experienced a slowing down of our life in the past twelve months because of our calendars, that they have emptied. I don’t know about you, Seth, but that was to me, probably the best benefit of something like this that has not been a good thing. I have welcomed the lowered expectations of me needing to be somewhere at a certain time and having to run all over town to take kids places, stuff like that. It’s been a really nice slowing down in that department. Seth: I agree with you 100%. We were talking the other night about how there was a moment early in the pandemic when my business on one front slowed down so much that I was actually concerned. But by the same token, we were eating out zero, we were going zero, we were driving zero, and we started realizing maybe we’re losing a little bit of money but we’re also saving a ton of money just as a result of the slowness. Then we started realizing we’re more connected, we’re spending more time together, we see each other just because the pace of life had slowed down so much. Over the last six months, it’s slowly creeped up and I miss some of those things, some of that slow time. I just miss it. Tsh: Yeah, I do too. This is for me why it’s a benefit to do something like walk because you can claim it. Walking is completely not efficient. You don’t get anywhere quickly when you walk. If I choose to walk to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription or to the library to pick up a book, by walking I’m intentionally taking the harder, slower, more methodical route. But I welcome the space. Many times I listen to an audiobook or a podcast but I’m also really and truly embracing the being with my thoughts, especially in the Spring when I can hear birds and wind and things like that and I don’t want to miss them. What’s been on my mind is this idea that we can all collectively understand, three different ways that we can embrace a more sacramental nature of slow and it all has to do with response. Responding to the world around us. The first one, and I’m curious what you think, Seth. Actually, while I pull it up, I’m pulling up a tweet that I retweeted. I didn’t write it but I loved it, I read it last week. How quickly do you respond to email?Seth: I’m not super great at it. Some of it is that I put parameters around my time. If you shoot me a business email that’s non-urgent after hours I’m not going to respond. Period. End of story. Until business hours. There are exceptions to that. I have a client who will periodically text me something and he’s in a different time zone and will text and say I know it’s after hours but will you look at the email, then yeah. I will do that. I am probably an efficient responder to emails but I’m not always timely because I don’t respond after hours. I’m pretty slow. Tsh: I’m very slow. No one will give me an award for inbox zero, ever. I saw this tweet, it’s by a guy named Mark Sparrow, I don’t know who it is but just says, “Best email signature ever: It is normal for me to take a couple of days to read my emails and several more days to reflect on the matter and respond in a calm manner. The culture of immediacy and the constant fragmentation of time are not compatible with the kind of life I lead.” Seth: That’s amazing. Tsh: I know. It feels a little stick it to the man-ish. I can see how somebody can read it and think who are you to say that this is not compatible with the life you lead? I need an answer ASAP. But I really like this because I think the point of an email signature like this is saying, listen, these things you are putting in my inbox, you’re not owed a quick response. Someone even commented below that when they started work in the early 90s it was just a normal practice to not respond to a letter within two weeks. This sudden expectation for a same day, sometimes same hour response is just not realistic. I once heard my favorite definition of an email inbox, it was like a to-do list from somebody else, or a to-do list for someone else’s time. I forget how they said it. Basically, it’s people wanting things from you most of the time. For me, I really like this idea of embracing a slow to reply posture. I’ve done this for a long time. I’ve had this no-need-to-reply practice to my emails but to me, I feel like this might be an encouragement to anyone listening that there is perhaps not as urgent a need to reply to that email,…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
