This week concludes the first week of the social media challenge I’m hosting with my friend Benita this month on Instagram. The challenge is called “The Jane Austen Life” challenge. It’s different in from other social media challenges in that it encourages participants to enjoy old-fashioned activities off of social media, only posting and sharing about their experiences on Instagram when and how they choose.
You can find out more about the challenge on my Instagram, @jennie.in.fairyland
How It All Began…
I got the idea for this challenge based off of a few months I spent living very slowly, at nineteen years old. I had just completed a semester of community college classes, but my studies were on hold as I moved with my family across the country to Pennsylvania.
I was in the process of applying to one of the local universities in our new location, but I knew I wouldn’t start until the spring semester. Left to my own devices, I fell into what my sister and I called “The Jane Austen Life.”
My sister and I walked two hours together every day. (This was inspired by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, the great Russian composer, who insisted on such a routine, even in the depths of a Russian winter. It was very cold and snowy in the northern Pennsylvanian town we’d just moved to, and my sister and I liked to think we were just as tough as Tchaikovsky!)
When we were home, I played the piano and practiced my arias and art songs. It was something I needed to do, as I was preparing to enroll as a music major at university, but back then I really just sang for the joy of it. And I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote, a historical novel as well as an operetta that I notated very badly on a free online notation site. That project will never see the light of day (I’m not sure I really have what it takes to become a composer) but it still brings a smile to my face when I think about it!
Music, walking, and writing. It was not unlike how the famous author spent most of her days in the quiet countryside of Hampshire. Jane’s life was short, and possibly unhappy, but I can’t help feeling it must have been a good life, a life more real and connected to worthy pursuits than the hectic and online life I lead today.
Sadly, I began classes in the spring, and my “Jane Austen Life” was over. So, too, was any amount of creativity or inspiration I’d ever possessed. I slogged through my college years with a numbness that pains me to remember to this day. I didn’t start to come alive again until several years into my working life, when I picked up a pen and started once again to write a novel.
It’s been a long, hard journey to recapture that girl I was before I completed formal schooling. Growing up at home, unschooled, and free to learn and create what I pleased, the structured settings of university and workplace were a tough adjustment for me; and not one that changed me for the better. Yes, maybe I grew a backbone during those years. But I also became hardened. I lost some vital spark that had always been present in me since childhood, a way of looking at the world through rainbow-hued lenses, spying fairies and goblins in every corner.
And now this beautiful month of May is just one month of many that I slowly climb back to that life, that peace, that joy of the girl I once was. It’s a month when I will slow down, shut out the noise, and reclaim my true self.
Will you join me?
Whether you use Instagram or not, I invite you to participate with me. Choose as many old-fashioned activities as you like from the list on the slides above. Challenge yourself to slow down and include them in your day-to-day routine.
What joy and peace and energy will await you when you escape the noisy hustle-bustle to find out who you are?
What a fun challenge! I don’t have Instagram, but I’ll definitely participate 😄 and I totally agree with you about college -- it sapped me of creativity as well, and gave me debilitating anxiety. It took me years to recover from that. If I could turn back time, I would have chosen another path for sure. It’s astounding how damaging education can be, and how we have to unlearn everything we were taught about life.
It sounds like you had the pause you needed before college started. I think a return to simplicity is so needed-we rush too much, too fast, too soon. Long walks are very beneficial exercise;)