Thankful for Slowness

[blue rare]

Freeways, corporate efficiency experts, optical fibre internet, rapid transit, executive MBAs, electric bikes, fast food, instant fashion, and bullet trains.  Everything, it seems, is moving at a velocity that’s difficult for the human soul to bear.  A friend of mine listens to all audiobooks at 1.5x or 2x speed, so that it sounds like the narrators have been huffing helium.  I sometimes find myself getting impatient waiting for the air fryer or the microwave.  How messed up is that?

This Thanksgiving weekend, as I always try to do, I reflected upon some of the things in this life that I’m truly grateful for.  (I find this conscious effort to remember and celebrate at least a few of the ways I’ve been ridiculously fortunate and privileged over the years helps keep some of the more selfish, narcissistic, whiny, and overly precious aspects of my nature in some sort of balance.  Honestly, knocking my worst character traits back down sometimes feels like playing an exhausting and never-ending game of whack-a-mole.) One of the things that seemed to form a bit of a theme for me this year was my appreciation of those extended periods of time in which it seemed to me that time itself became slower, more elastic, more spacious, and capacious, and forgiving.

I remembered, for example, a time last Autumn when I found myself staying for two beautiful days and nights at a farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania.  It was so quiet and still.  I walked around late at night, listening to the sounds of crickets and the barking of a fox.  There were seemingly endless fields bathed in an eerie yellowish light.  I sat on an abandoned Naugahyde armchair outside an abandoned gas station, watching bats and cumulonimbus clouds moving overhead.  It felt as if I had somehow stumbled upon some strangely beautiful liminal space, a threshold between the ordinary world and a more mysterious place ruled by dream logic, where ordinary concepts of time are rendered nonsensical.  It was surprising to me that a U.F.O. didn’t descend from behind a cloud to silently hover above the grain.  That night I fell asleep to the hiss of traffic on the distant freeway that sounded like the roll of faraway surf.  It had been a long time since I had felt quite so peaceful.

More recently, I was traveling by plane between New York and Texas, when I wound up on the receiving end of a nine-hour delay in my flight.  It involved planing and then deplaning, being stuck in a bus on the tarmac of JFK, and ultimately being shuffled through multiple airport departure lounges.  I wasn’t especially put out by this, as it’s happened to me many times; I like to travel, and it sort of comes with the territory.  Beyond that, it seemed like something of a rare treat, because I had luckily packed along a copy of Tana French’s second-to-latest novel, The Searcher.  It’s a beautifully written and deliciously slow-burning crime novel set in rural Ireland, seemingly tailor made for extended periods of waiting.  While a hundred frustrated travelers all around me were on their devices complaining, yelling, canceling, and re-booking travel plans, I was turning pages and imagining myself in Irish woods and pubs, lost inside someone else’s imagination.

Increasingly often, I find myself seeking out these moments of solitude, of stillness, of waiting.  Or else embracing them when they come my way.  I linger in bookstores, and light candles in empty churches.  I wander through graveyards and sit on park benches, watching my dog bury her head beneath the fallen leaves, thankful for the elegant slowness of all the precious passing hours.


Although it was only a few months ago, this installment of [blue rare], from our Thanksgiving (October 18th) edition, seems to hit home even harder now than it did then. Perhaps it’s a result of the Christmas Season, and how it seems to get busier and more frantic each and every year.  So I was quite happy when a Voice reader reminded me of it, and agree that it certainly fits as part of the Best of.