Slow

This word has been bastardized recently. A term meant to evoke thoughtful, conscious, step by step implementation has been morphed by a society that travels to fast for itself. Slow is now synonymous with stunted. “Are you slow?” people ask (or used to) someone who they don’t find intelligent. It’s analogous to intellectual paralysis.

Slow, if you really sit with it, is a beautiful word. A concept that reminds you to stop fidgeting. Stop grabbing the phone, the TV, the book, the whatever and allow things to happen. Watch. Do little if anything. Accept. Again, the very idea to do little if anything and just allow things can seem infuriating. We are the dreamers of our dreams. We fight the dying of the light. We do not go gently. But how much of this effort is just wasted energy. I don’t mean this in a rhetorical way, I quite literally ask that you look at how much effort you expend on things and how much you have to show for those things? I’d venture to say that most of what you do on a daily basis is just wasted energy. Doing things for the sake of doing things because “they need to be done.” Many things do, of course, need to be done, but how many of those things are we doing on a daily basis. 1? Maybe 2? The rest is filler.

We have so much time on our hands we don’t know what to do with it, and the idea that we would take things slowly, that we would sit quietly in a room, by ourself, is simply too much.

You don’t have to sit on a chair cross legged, zoned out, to feel as if you’re “slow.” You can just do a tiny bit less, day by day. You can ask yourself if the thing you’re doing is essential, and if so, why, and if not, why do it? You can relax your shoulders. You can take off your armor and stop beating back against the incessant waves that will never stop hitting the shore.

Slow is not some outdated new age idea of living on a beach and picking your own coffee beans. It’s simply a reminder to observe the greater world around you, rather than forcing yourself to brrrrrrrrrr into it. It’s to take a step back, mentally, and physically and be present. You’re not solving anything. There’s no goal (this drives many of us crazy.) You’re just quite literally breathing. Then another one. Then another.