Making Time for Slowness
Autumn has a different rhythm. The light changes. The air shifts. Even the trees seem to know it’s time to let go.
This is the season of slowness. Of early evenings and slower mornings. Of soup simmering and sweaters pulled from storage. Of tuning inward. You feel it in your body before you understand it in your head. Like something inside of you wants to tend to something, to do one thing, slowly and on purpose.
I used to resist this. I clung to summer’s energy, its urgency. But the older I get, the more I welcome the slowdown. The quiet. The rest.
There’s relief there. No one expects you to be out seizing the day when it gets dark at six. The world gives you permission to slow down and…here’s the thing, you don’t actually need permission to slow down, you never did…. but it still feels good to have the season on your side.
Lately, I’ve been consciously trying to make space for slowness. I'm moseying instead of rushing. Reading instead of scrolling. Letting things take the time they take.
This is hard for me, because historically, I’ve always been a busy-body. My early childhood experiences with neglect and invisibility morphed into people-pleasing and hyper-independence. Desperately trying to alleviate the burden of your own existence to everyone around you is a lonely and exhausting hamster wheel to find yourself on. It’s doing the most and feeling like a failure anyway.
At some point, you just can’t anymore. At some point, you have to sit down to rest and upon doing so, you might realize that you are absolutely exhausted from the futility of it all. So you unburden yourself of the desire to do all the things all the time.
Rushing is a habit that colonizes every aspect of your being. You rush the walk through the park, then you rush the meal with a loved one, then you rush the conversation, and by the end of the day you’ve rushed through the whole damn thing without savouring a minute of it. Without actually tasting any of the absolutely scrumptious moments of joy that were there all along had you not been too busy to notice.
Walking, actual walking as a pleasure not a transportation method, at a speed that brings all your senses along for the ride, is a form of protest against hustle culture these days. You notice the leaves. You notice your breath. You can see and feel and connect with the world around you. And you arrive to wherever you were going having actually travelled there, instead of just fast-forwarding yourself from one daily checkpoint to another. You trade the state of low-grade agitation that has become the norm for a state of calm and wonder.
Reading instead of scrolling is the same trade. Scrolling is anxious consumption at the speed of anxious and perpetual FOMO. It’s fast enough that nothing actually sticks in your brain but slow enough that you can’t look away because what if the next video is the video that changes everything? But it never is, so you keep anxiously scrolling for some sort of external, existential revelation that doesn’t exist. Reading asks more of you, but it gives more back. A book is patience. You’re allowed to put it down and wander away in your thoughts and then pick up where you left off when your mind returns to the world it holds in its pages. You sit with it and welcome the words into your imagination. You and the author are co-conspirators. They write a piece of the world into existence and you carry it with you for years, sometimes forever, because in some small way, it was actually you who made the story come to life. With a book, you’re an active participant in the art, rather than just a passive consumer of it.
Letting things take the time they take is a hard one because you have to give up the illusion of control.
Rest gets scheduled on your calendar like a meeting. Grief gets a three-day bereavement policy. Healing must happen after a few sessions. It’s too tidy. Like paperwork and policies. Too confining. Things take however long they take.
Nature doesn’t rush. The tree in your front yard doesn’t look at the neighbour’s maple, still fully dressed in it’s glorious reds, and worry about being behind schedule. It will let go of its leaves when it lets go of its leaves because it’s attuned, humming along to the rhythms of nature in its own voice.
I think what I’m reaching for is that attunement. Effort at the right tempo. Adding to the chorus, not the cacophony.
Some things need speed and immediate action, of course. Deadlines, hot pans, things that have been put off for too long, tumours, etc. But most things in life, the good things, want time. Like soup and brilliant ideas and love and Sunday mornings and your body. Sometimes the so called bad things want time too, like grief. Grief needs time.
Like a bad parent, hustle culture tries to make your rest seem like a moral failing. You need to try harder, do more, be more, be better… and then and only then will you be worthy of love, of attention, of life.
But rest isn’t laziness. Laziness is a moral judgement invented by people who profit from your exhaustion, foisted upon a biological imperative. You can resist slowing down and resting up until the point that your body commands it. But the crash, the illness, the burnout will eventually arrive like an overdue bill gone to collections.
You can resist it, or you can make space for it. Intentionally.
The world will try to fill every unguarded minute of your life if you let it. You have to go on the defensive. Build a moat around your well being. Say no to the thing you don’t want to go to. Let the walk be the whole point. let the evening be unproductive. Let yourself be.
And I’m not romanticizing this. Well, maybe I am a little. But I still have a job. I still have bills and deadlines, and a relentless to do list that regenerates daily like an angry hydra. I’m not moving to a cabin in the woods and shunning humanity, as much as I would like to sometimes. I’m just…choosing to tune in to the season a bit. Choosing to slow down enough to hear the whispers of the trees, telling us all that stillness has it’s time too.