in praise of slowing down

life is pure process

Taehyoung Jeon

more of a journal entry today friends, thank you for being here.

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Time moves differently when you’re fully present. When you walk down your childhood street and admire the greenness, the softness after torrential rain: the streets thoroughly cleaned by downpour. The freshness of flowers and fruit: frangipani, crepe flower of bougainvillea, green chillis. Glinting in the mid-afternoon sunlight. You’re not used to moving without a phone on you, it feels strange — no music, no podcasts, no scrolling. No ambient noise. Just the world in full detail. Time feels like honey, slow and sweet.

Keeping time feels like an urgent task in today’s accelerating society. Am I where I’m meant to be? Am I getting there quick enough? Am I getting the grade, the review, the funding? I used to worry about that a lot in college. I floated along listening to other people and what they wanted. And I absorbed a lot more than I wanted to. Proximity is intimacy after all. There was much chatter about the future. How glorious it could be. But by focusing intently on the forecast, the projection of the world I wanted, I forgot about the present. How simple, peaceful it was. How I was the youngest I’d ever be, living and breathing and investing in the world — reading and dancing and roaming through it.

Lately time has been moving too fast. The places I used to frequent are all closed, my brother grows a head taller every time I see him, all my friends are moving away, doors and empty apartments spinning in their wake. The map of my life is getting larger, choices feel weightier. All the things I vowed to love forever have changed, and I’m changing too.

For a while I was barreling at life at an unsustainable pace trying to do everything: co-opting myself to corporate hustle culture and writing this substack and working out and socializing with new friends and maintaining relationships. It seemed normal at the time but now I look back and realize I was doing too much, too rapidly.

Now I’m trying really hard to slow down. Pay complete attention. Lately I’ve internalized there’s something so sacred about focus, rather than constantly deliberating between monitor screens and plans and side hustles. Depth rather than breadth. In a world that is increasingly accelerating — social media eyeballs and immediate gratification and a pressure to live a saturated, intense, rapid life — slowing down might be the greatest antidote and meaningful rebellion.

I wrote this in the pandemic but my ideas on slow progress remain the same:

I know that growth can be imperceptible and quiet. I’ve accepted that. Eventually progress loses its shine of exponential improvement simply because as each year goes by, each year becomes a smaller fraction of life in its entirety. There’s nothing to feel too bad about. Maybe the changes are incremental, but important. Maybe the emotions are softer, gradual, more profound. 

It reminds me of writing and how I wake up week after week and get stuck on the blank page again and again. How I always despair that I have no more good ideas and, even if I did, not enough eloquence to convey said ideas. But I love it still. I love how writing brings everything to the surface, how it generates and absorbs my attention. How it taps into the truest part of myself and asks me who I am, who I want to be. There’s no immediate return. In fact, it’s achingly slow. Coherence takes practice. So does any form of love or devotion. You wake up and you choose it and the next day you gladly do it all over again.

The hard thing is remaining patient. The essential thing is presence. Intention. Complete surrender to the present moment. All I have to do is focus on the small thing in front of me, trusting that every deep curiosity I kindle and devote myself to leads me closer to my true center over time.

With days like this, rain and rebirth, I think to myself: Life is pure process. What a gift it is to experience this little sliver of it. I don’t need the next thing. I just need to slow down and savor this moment. Perhaps what I want, what I’ve always wanted, is already here; already mine.

PS: you might like my other essays related to “doing too much” and future-focused thinking: the next thing and you can have everything

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Quote of the Week

I count the days because I love them too much. I count the days already knowing that one day I will remember how tactless it was of me to have counted the days when I could have so easily have enjoyed them. I count the days to pretend that losing it all doesn't phase me.

Anthony Doerr

&

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

Kurt Vonnegut

Things I’ve been consuming (and recommend!)

Mostly books, but in the coming stacks I will be adding essays too:

White Oleander by Janet Fitch - just so lyrical (and very heartbreaking). This book is as close as it gets to poetry as it gets. It’s about the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship, abandonment, finding oneself again.

Tempo by Venkatesh Rao (rec by S, thank you) - varying reviews but I found it a particularly insightful extended metaphor that we live life according to tempo (rhythm, movement) rather than linear time. An important concept is that our narrative rationality violates calculative rationality, and that’s only natural and human.

Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson - An essay exploring the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Here’s an excerpt I saved:

As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.

French Song of the Week (huuge Polo & Pan fan, perhaps a reshare)