Slow living
Most reports are that I'm a pretty laidback person. I've been described as calm. I can hold a silence. I'm in no hurry. Which is in large part deliberate. The pace of so much stuff is too much. I'd be lying in the field, slowly decomposing, still saying the pace was too much. Real busy becoming one with the dirt.
I'm on holiday right now, enforcing some chill. Taking my time. It's not always possible, of course it's not always possible. Which is why it's so important for me to try when I can.
It's also not so simple because almost anything can be done in a 'fast' way. I like jigsaws, for me they are very slow living. But there is speed puzzling which looks like lots of fun and lots of people love it. Separately, there are the people who can make pretty much anything a competitive sport. Something to brag about. So slowing down is very personal. For me I guess there's a lot of mindfulness, which I'm tempted to put inverted commas round.
Sometimes when I'm doing something I don't want to do - cleaning the toilet, washing up, and so on - I'll make a game of how mindful I can be, how slow I can do it. Makes it seem more profound somehow. And I'm not wishing the moment, and my life, away. Pretend I'm on the Netflix documentary Chef's Table: how cinematically can I wash this pan.
I've written about the slow web and I've been trying to slow things down in that way. There's James's Artemis, a calm web reader. Or Current. People are thinking about this, which is good. I do find RSS pretty chill already.
The slow movement first came into vogue with slow food. Slow cooking. And eating. I'm onboard with this on several levels. Untethered from lunch breaks and other people, left to my own devices, my eating schedule is so different. If I just ate when I wanted to, when I was properly hungry, it would look very different. I think I'd eat when I got up, say about seven. Then somewhere between two and four depending on exertion. That'd be me done. But it's super anti social.
Reading can absolutely be done fast, not just as in reading speed but in a frenzied, hectic way, to targets and so on. Longer, denser, (often older) books really slow me down. Which sometimes is exactly what I'm looking for, just as sometimes I want something quick and snappy.
Then there's convenient stuff that, if I'm not careful, I take for granted. Our hot water tap broke and I had to boil the kettle. The kettle! Takes two minutes? Wasted. Frustration for all one hundred and twenty seconds. Until I realised that was madness of me.
There's a single little shop in this village (and two pubs, a standard ratio) which is closed from one till two for lunch. And why not. Why shouldn't it be. The road outside it is at an approximately forty-degree angle and one-car wide. There's a stable and two horses underneath my accommodation, off the main car park. Everything is slow here. It has to be. And I wrote this post under some silver birch trees at a very mossy picnic table listening to the birds.