“Come, ducks, come sit soft,” my friend called from in front of the fire in the living room just off the dining room where a sprawling group of us had just enjoyed a delicious meal. She is British, which means strange things come out of her mouth all the time and sound all the lovelier because they arrive cloaked in that great accent. This invitation, to “sit soft,” is one of my favorite things she says and to do. I pushed back my hard backed chair with a smile and replied,“Yes, ducks, let’s do.”
My former mother in law, although not British, used to say something similar, “Come, sit on the bed.” Sometimes this was accompanied by a pat on an actual bed, but over time it became clear that it marked a move into a mode of being. “Let’s settle in, cozy up, chat about everything or nothing in particular.”
Recently I had another soft sitting kind of experience. I finally made it to a massage appointment (shout out to Praan Thai Massage in Watertown, MA) that I had rescheduled maybe eight times. At first, I was worried that the woman working with me was a little too tentative and gentle, which I confess is a pet peeve of mine. It became apparent that what I misunderstood as hesitancy was close and careful attention. Her work was not gentle so much as intentional, focused, and attuned. At some point, her boss knocked on the door and said “1 hour”! Maybe there was a murmured acknowledgement but her hands did not stop or even stutter. It felt like a gentle and powerful form of defiance; no ticking clock was going to collapse our “soft sitting” (or I guess soft lying down) space, not on her watch.
The soft sit feels like an almost radical move in a world that tends to value optimization, efficiency, and productivity over the pleasurable, the messy, and the meandering. I hope you will accept or extend an invitation to "Come, sit soft" sooner rather than later. The chairs are cozy, and savoring and delighting can be a super-productive use of time.
Love, Jill