Rewind | On Choosing Less and Keeping It Longer

A film disappeared from our watchlist this summer. It had been there for months, (it was one of those we'd get to eventually kind of things) and then one evening, it simply wasn't. The licensing had lapsed somewhere, and a decision was made in a room I'll never see about what my family could watch.

It's a small thing. But it stayed with me, because it made something obvious that I'd managed not to notice: almost none of the media in our house was actually ours.

This summer we bought a television with a VCR built into it. This was such a special find on Facebook Marketplace and I couldn’t wait to take it home. It weighs more than my son, but the picture is soft at the edges and when you press the tape in, it makes a sound like a mechanical click and whir that signals something is about to begin.

My children have never seen anything like it.

What surprised me was not that they immediately loved it, it was how differently they watched their movies.

It inherently slows you down because of the quiet ritual to it. You choose a tape, which means walking to the shelf and looking at what's there rather than scrolling past four hundred options while nobody decides. You put it in and it plays the old previews of movies that came out over a decade ago.

When the film starts, you realize it can’t be paused casually. It cannot be abandoned two minutes in for something else. When it ends, the screen goes blue and there is nothing waiting to autoplay, and no algorithm suggesting the next best thing. You simply get up, and decide what’s next.

So they sat. All the way through, every time. And afterward we talked about what we'd watched, because there was nothing immediately filling the silence.

I hadn't realized how much of what we call attention is just the absence of an alternative.

It started with the television, but it didn't stay there. We've been buying records again, and CDs from the bookstore. My daughter has started building a small stack of albums that are hers. Not a playlist that reshuffles itself, but songs in a fixed order that she now knows by heart because that's the only way they come.

And of course the books, always books. We spend hours in bookstores, not buying exactly, just being in a room full of things you can pick up. A book asks a child to build the world themselves. Nobody hands them a face or a voice or a color. They have to make it, and what they make belongs to them completely. My daughter's version of a story she's read is not mine, and never will be, and that difference is the whole point. A screen delivers a world. A book requires one.

And there's the object itself. The covers we choose, the page corners we fold and maybe even a little stain from whatever you were eating on the afternoon you simply couldn’t put the book down.

I don't think this is nostalgia, exactly. I have no particular desire to go back. But I've come to believe that a thing you can hold behaves differently than a thing you can access.

A book on a shelf is a small argument for itself every time you walk past it. A record has to be turned over halfway through, which means someone has to be paying attention. A photograph in a drawer is a thing you find rather than search for.

And none of it can be edited after the fact. No one can revise the film you own, or quietly remove the song, or change the words on page forty because they read differently now. What you bought is what you have. That used to be unremarkable.

What I've noticed most, though, is how much calmer our house has been, and the fewer decisions to be made. There are fewer interruptions, no ads, no autoplay, no notification arriving in the middle of the third act. These fewer options, turned out to be its own kind of relief. I think we mistake abundance for freedom. Four hundred choices doesn't always feel like liberty, it feels like work.

This is why the philosophy of intentionality and slow living is so important and embedded in what we make at Corduroy Farm.

The impulse behind curating a shelf of books and the impulse behind a well-made garment turn out to be the same one. Both are a decision to choose fewer things and keep them longer. Both ask for a little more at the outset. More thought, more investment and more patience in exchange for something that lasts.

It would be easier to move faster. But I keep thinking about my children at twelve, at twenty, and what they’ll remember. Not the clothes, particularly, but the pace. Whether their childhood felt like something that happened to them or something they were inside of.

So we grow slowly. We use natural fibers, because cotton, linen and wool soften with age in a way synthetics never do. We release less than we could, and we say no to shortcuts that would be invisible to everyone but us.

None of this is efficient, that is rather the point.

At Corduroy Farm, our clothing is for the mother who would rather have four things she loves than twelve she tolerates. Who is tired of replacing the same garment every year. Who wants what her children wear to be part of the same unhurried life she’s trying to build for them everywhere else.

That feels worth something to us.