About

My name is Michelle Snape, and I have been writing here since 2007.

The idea is older than the blog. It began in 2001, in my grandmother's kitchen, with a question I asked out of pure frustration.

I had a newborn and a three-year-old. I had a washing machine, a clothes dryer, a microwave, a good car and a laptop — and I could not reliably get a load of washing on the line or remember to return the DVDs. My grandmother raised four children in a house she and my grandfather built themselves, with no electricity and no town water. She cooked breakfast for ten shearers. She milked the cow, made the bread, collected the eggs, grew the vegetables, sewed the clothes, made the soap and the butter, washed in the copper, and balanced the family budget. She had no job, and she always found a way to make money anyway.

So I asked her:

Why is it that we have every labour-saving device under the sun, and yet we seem to have no time to do anything?

Her answer changed the way I saw my own life. I took out my laptop and typed every word.

Twenty-five years later, I am still working on the answer.

My grandmother at 95 years, with her seedlings.

Where the name comes from

A Vision Splendid is a line from Banjo Paterson's Clancy of the Overflow:

And he sees the vision splendid
of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wondrous glory
of the everlasting stars.

A vision splendid is not a destination. It sits out on the horizon, and we move toward it knowing we will never quite arrive. That is not a failure. That is the point. The joy is in the journey.

What this publication actually is

I am not a guru, and this is not a system.

I run a home. I run a family. I run two law firms and another business besides. I am, by any honest measure, an extremely busy woman — which makes me an unlikely person to write about slowing down, and possibly the right one.

What I have is a philosophy, handed to me by a generation of women who knew how to work hard without losing their lives to it. What I do is test it. My life is the laboratory: the kitchen, the budget, the business, the calendar. Some of it works beautifully. Some of it does not survive contact with a Tuesday.

I write down what happens either way.

There is a message in the world at the moment that says: you are so busy, you deserve a shortcut. I have come to distrust it. When someone asks me how I am and I hear myself say "busy", I notice that busy is not an emotion. It is a description of a calendar, and calendars can be changed.

So the question I keep returning to is this one: can we slow down and still thrive?

Not slow down and give up our work, our income or our standards. Slow down and still thrive.

I think we can. I am testing it in public, month by month, and I would rather do that alongside other people than alone.

The rhythm here

Each month carries a theme through the Book of Days — Release, Restore, Rebalance, Reflect, Rest, Repair — and we take that theme across four parts of life: mind, home, finances and energy. Around it I write essays, kitchen notes and household wisdom, mostly old, occasionally borrowed, always tested.

You are welcome to read quietly. You are more welcome still to write back and tell me how it went in your house, because the collective wisdom is better than mine alone.

Michelle Snape is a lawyer, speaker, business strategist and writer. She lives in the Manning Valley in New South Wales with her husband and two sons, and has been publishing A Vision Splendid since 2007.

Live simply, live joyfully. Follow the old paths — they are tried and true.