Slowness has always been accompanied by wisdom. “Take the pace of nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson advised. “Her secret is patience.” A couple of millennia and change before that, Lao Tzu said something like, “Nature takes its time, but things happen.”
However, these days, the papayas of slowness have taken on a slightly more insistent tone. “We ride a bus that races faster and faster towards the cliff, and we celebrate every added mile per hour as progress,” wrote French economist Timati Parik in Slow down or diepublished last May. “It’s crazy. Maximizing growth is like hitting the accelerator with the absolute certainty of dying in social and environmental collapse.”
Japanese philosopher and economist Kohei Saito covered a similar territory in Slow downhis 2024 degrowth manifesto. Our obsession with GDP contributes not only to our collective suffering, but to our eventual demise. After all, economic growth can be seen as a social manifestation of individual drive – we want, therefore we buy.
“We live in a cult of terminal speed,” wrote the psychotherapist and author Francis Weller Art In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soulwork in Times of Uncertaintycollection of essays. “The type of mania that consumes us in constant motion. Much is lost in this mad devotion to speed.”
In the era of AI, when the common man consumes more info in a day than anyone in the 15th century in a lifetime, one can understand why slowness seems important. People are caught up in rat races, leading stressful, over-connected lives. But it is one thing to slow down at the system level, and quite another to slow down as an individual.
In an age of artificial intelligence, where the average person consumes more information in a day than someone in the 15th century would have consumed in a lifetime, it’s understandable why slowness seems important.
Can mindfulness help us take our foot off the gas pedal? And can personal practice significantly affect the speed at which society moves?
Making a mode to a mode of being
“Practicing mindfulness is definitely a tangible way to slow down,” says mindfulness expert Andrey Olendzki. “If only for a short session, one deliberately moves out of the ‘doing’ mode to stay in the ‘being’ mode.
Staying in mode of being has a tangible effect on our internal speedometer. “Practicing mindfulness is a way to teach yourself to slow down in every possible way, and breathing rate is the most accessible way to do that,” Olendzky says.
Indeed, research shows that those who meditate for a long time have a lower breathing rate than those who do not meditate. Being able to physiologically slow down when one is operating at a higher register can bring a degree of deliberation to a “fast” effort. It can help us embody the tortoise, despite a large number of hares.
Being able to physiologically slow down when one is operating at a higher register can bring a degree of deliberation to a “fast” effort. It can help us embody the tortoise, despite a large number of hares.
When this intentionality embraces the body, it can spread to the mind, creating a countercurrent to the speed at which modern life moves. It can teach us not only to slow down during ordinary contemplative practices like meditation, journaling, or yoga, but also to shift into lower gears in the midst of the daily grind, when we feel the most pressure to maintain forward momentum.
“For most people today, speed depends on external interactions: busy schedules, phones set to notify you of every incoming message, and the underlying trend of ‘multitasking’ in today’s lifestyle,” says Olendzki. “I think the pace at which one lives one’s life is a matter of habit and, like all habits, learned. There is much in our society that encourages moving quickly, and I like to think that we still have a choice in how much we participate in that.”
Unlearning our addiction to speed
So in some respects, slowing down involves a type of unlearning. We are so used to the speed of information transfer that we don’t realize that we don’t need to respond to every notification that vibrates in our pockets. Anthropologist Thomas Hiland Eriksen distinguished between “fast time”—writing an email or completing a report—and “slow time”—leisure time, such as making art or sitting still. He observed that when fast time and slow time collide—timelines compared to writing poetry—fast time always wins. But when we notice this imbalance, we can prefer slow time.
Mindfulness can support our efforts to slow down as it reorients us to the rhythm of the breath, the pace of nature, and the workings of the mind.
We may need support in this election. Maybe that’s why books about Slow Birding, Low productivity, Slow gratificationand Slow seasons— a guide to returning to nature. In an age of abundance, those of us in privileged positions crave less, not more.
In this sense, Lao Tzu, Emerson, and Weller may be on to something when they advise us to take a cue from natural rhythms. In his book, Weller recalled his mentor, Clark Berry, who put his hand on the stone and showed that it was working at geological speeds:
Geological speed – the rhythm of epochs, millennia – is deeply engraved in our bones. When we allow ourselves the time and pace of the stone, we come to a deep remembrance of who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred. We remember the values associated with this ancient cadence, which include patience, restraint and reciprocity.
Mindfulness can support our efforts to slow down as it reorients us to the rhythm of the breath, the pace of nature, and the workings of the mind. Whether it can solve the political and economic problems plaguing society is questionable, but people who can achieve respite can help shape systems that prioritize it. After all, mindfulness isn’t about getting somewhere, or getting ahead, or even achieving this.
“Be as mindful as possible of the pace at which you live on any given day,” Weller wrote. “Try to notice what happens when you slow down and go into a flow of connection with daylight, wind, city sounds, birdsong, crickets, or silence.”
Life may be terminal, but our speed is not necessarily.
