slowness as an ideal

what does it mean to live slowly?

Update: I’ve published a deluxe version of this essay here.

The Late Spring by Barry McGalen

Someone recently asked me: what’s the one word you’d use to describe your ideal day? I thought about it. Then: hmm, probably slow.

Above all, I want to live with slowness. In travel, in reading, in work, in love. No rushing. No haste. Just patient, savory slowness. 

The people I admire most never seem to rush but are always where they need to be. They never seem to sweat but get a lot done. And they never hyperventilate but take deep, green breaths.

They live with a definite slowness.

Take their time to make decisions, allowing intuition to bubble up to the surface of awareness, but then act swiftly and with conviction. They have a deep sense of connection with themselves and clear direction because they carve the stillness needed to cultivate it. They work on projects that look tedious and silly to others—like spending half a decade planting a rose garden or building their own home or committing to a decade-long reading program—that don’t require speed because of their mass¹. Infinitely satisfied by what gets done each day, their sense of enoughness divorced from the world of achievement.

Slowness is hard

The Western world worships speed. It whispers: speed up or get left behind. Patience is no longer viewed as a virtue but a sign of low ambition and laziness. 

Like the Red Queen tells Alice: “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”

Immersed in the shallow world of speed, the only things that seem worth doing have immediate and obvious and “useful” returns². 

But the faster I move, the less I feed the part of myself that is hungry for silence and quiet and thinking hard about the same thing for half an hour. When that part starves, it's felt in the body as a sense of sadness, emptiness, dread. A certain motion sickness from the turn of the earth.

My life descends from standing back to admire the Port de Marseilles of life, to pressing my nose into the canvas. 

Slowness deepens time

I’ve spent much of this month sitting in front of a screen until my eyes pierce the back of my brain. I answer a few emails, finish some trivial task, resurface and three hours have passed like three minutes. The days smudge and smear into each other. 

The faster I move through time, the faster time moves through me. I forget all the busiest times in my life. They blur into one long traumatic technology-infused day³. 

Everyone talks about living longer (extending horizontal time) but few talk about living deeper (expanding vertical time). It’s tempting to treat time as an objective unit, like centimeters or kilograms, but experienced time is subjective. Five minutes can feel like an hour. Five hours can feel like five minutes. A decade can pass like two years, while two years may acquire the weight of a century.

A long life is a matter of deepening and densifying time. In other words, living slowly. 

Away from the noise, moving at a natural pace, the running tap of life turns into a rhythmed drip. Time stretches out and lays down. 

I can’t will myself into slowness

In my shoe-box apartment in downtown Buenos Aires, overlooking the Teatro Colón, there was no microwave. Naturally, I let my coffee go cold seven times a morning and not having a quick way to reheat it felt rather inconvenient. 

But by having to pour my coffee into a copper pot on the shaky gas stove and boldly ignite the burner with a Bic lighter, I was forced to slow down. To watch men in the street set up their fruit stands in the bluish-gray light, study the tacky tourist magnets that litter the fridge, breathe. See the coffee tremble from the heat as blue flames lick up around it. Smell the sharp, acrid bitterness when it burns. 

Nothing brings aliveness to experience like noticing. 

The same phenomenon occurs when I cover my TV with art or shut off my phone. I’m forced into the sticky world of enjoyment, instead of mere stimulation. 

true story…

Here’s the thing: I can’t will myself into slowness.

I can’t continue doing a bunch of speedy things but just go a little more slowly. Speed is a pathogen. Live in a speed-laced environment long enough, and before I know it I’m tripping over my own feet and debating a cocaine habit.

Slowness is a result of curating an environment that cultivates slack instead of speed, perpetuates ease instead of urgency. 

Designing a life that turns time into honey: slow and golden, thick and sweet. That creates space to stand back, to live with my eyes open. To foster an open-hearted appreciation and child-like receptivity. To notice what previously I had only seen: the joy in a mother’s eyes as she plays peekaboo with her baby boy in a coffee shop, the leathery lines on an old man’s face, the infinite texture of tree bark, the sunlight that cuts through the branches, the generous warmth of dawn that ripples goosebumps across chilled skin, the way the water spills like glass over riverbed rocks. Life, you know?

For me, slowness looks like rural living and limited technology and engaging with raw, rugged reality. Escaping notifications, evading chock-full calendars. Not being so goddamn terminally online. Living in pockets where the world loosens its grip. Finding recreation in richness: reading or puzzles or painting or long walks and longer conversations. Making things with my hands. Looking at beautiful objects. 

The world will never stop rushing me along, seducing me with speed.

But more and more I think I’m here just to enjoy the scenery.

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Thank you

Haley Brengartner

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👋 what i’ve been up to:

• I’ve spent the week in Austin. I carried the cold from Canada with me, as it’s been near-freezing. But largely the same routine of writing, reading, running, working. I’ve been walking to Palomino Coffee every morning to write, fabricating a little familiarity. I walked downtown to the Colorado River that cuts through the city, tried Texas BBQ, went to a pool hall, a few parks. My roommates in the Airbnb are characters.

• Notes on Austin: People are friendly, active, and skew young. People half-work, half-socialize in coffee shops. Everyone has either a Patagonia jacket, a dog, or a young kid (or all three). Seltzer is as popular as alcohol. A surprising amount of green space. New construction everywhere: cranes dot the downtown skyline and new cookie-cutter houses popping up in old neighborhoods, all with this identical modern boxy white-black facade. A 70 year old first-grade teacher I chatted to, who’s lived in Austin 52 years, called it “disposable housing”. It’s noticeably unwalkable compared to European cities (America was built for cars). Somehow it’s become “cool” to make fun of the U.S. but it’s an incredibly impressive country.

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

American naturalist E.O. Wilson on the necessity of nature:

“People can grow up with the outward appearance of normality in an environment largely stripped of plants and animals, in the same way that passable looking monkeys can be raised in laboratory cages and cattle fattened in feeding bins.

Asked if they were happy, these people would probably say yes.

Yet something vitally important would be missing. Not merely the knowledge and pleasure that can be imagined and might have been, but a wide array of experiences that the human brain is peculiarly equipped to receive.”

📸 photo of the week:

I didn’t take as many photos this week as planned because of how cold it was, but I’m clinging to my at-least-one-photo-a-day target.

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Tommy

1. As Nat Eliason writes in "Addicted to Speed": In physics, momentum is based on two factors: mass and velocity. An object's momentum increases as you speed it up or as you add more mass to it. When we're considering the momentum of our work or life, we're really considering the mass of what we’re working on and the speed at which we’re doing it. And if we're deficient in one, we can make up for it with the other. But we're not a mass culture. We're a speed culture.

2. Speed is largely responsible for the deterioration in art and devaluation in beauty. Churches were once built over multiple generations, outlasting the lifetime of most that worked on it. The Italian artist Masaccio spent 40 years making the door of the Duomo in Florence (literally his life’s work). Now cookie-cutter condos are thrown up in a year and most modern art is appalling (more shock factor than a gateway to the divine). To master any craft, like poetry or painting or violin, requires at least a decade of obscurity, working hard with little to show for it (plus a peculiar form of faith). It’s harder to do that now more than ever. Everything is expected to happen fast. With writing, I fight the urge to bail and surrender to a salary. Watching classmates begin a career is the modern-day stockade. Taking a year to wander is a life sentence.

3. In our longevity obsessed age, it’s crazy to me how used and abused technology is that warps our lives into lightspeed. How willingly we opt into the blinding ecstasy of speed. The bottom line: Technology doesn’t save time. Technology makes our lives faster.