I am not, by nature, a slow person. I have to practice it the way some people practice a foreign language — deliberately, a little awkwardly, aware at every moment that I could slip back into my native tongue without even noticing. These five ideas have helped me. Maybe one or two will help you.
1. Keep a “Not Today” List
Most of us are familiar with to-do lists. I’ve started keeping their quieter cousin: a list of things I am consciously choosing not to do today. Not because they don’t matter, but because they don’t matter right now. It sounds almost too simple, but writing something down and naming it as deferred is surprisingly different from just ignoring it. The list gives the anxiety somewhere to live so it doesn’t have to live in me. I revisit it at the end of the week, and more often than I’d expect, some items have resolved themselves without my help at all.
2. Eat One Meal Without a Screen
Just one. Breakfast, lunch, dinner — pick whichever feels most manageable. Sit with your food. Notice it. You don’t have to be contemplative about it. You don’t have to light a candle or think deep thoughts. Just eat without watching or scrolling. The practice has a way of spreading on its own.
3. Take the Long Way Sometimes
I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean literally drive or walk the route that takes four extra minutes. The one that passes the old cemetery, or the pond, or the street with the unusual mailboxes. Efficiency is a good servant and a poor master, and taking the long way is a small way of reminding yourself which role it’s supposed to play.
4. Set an Alarm for Stopping
We set alarms to start things constantly. I’ve found it useful to set one that tells me to stop — to step away from whatever I’m doing at, say, 9 p.m. and be done for the night. Not because everything is finished. Nothing is ever finished. But because I am not a machine, and the work will still be there in the morning, and I owe myself the mercy of an ending.
5. Reread Something You Already Love
There’s a quiet countercultural act in returning to a book, a film, a piece of music you already know well, in a world that constantly insists on the new. I’ve been thinking about why rereading feels so different from reading — something about how the second time through, you’re not tracking plot or argument, you’re just living in the thing. You notice what you missed. You’re less hurried. And I wonder if that’s what familiarity, at its best, is actually for — not comfort exactly, but a different quality of attention that novelty can’t quite give you.