so what do we all mean by 'slow living'?

and how does one live slowly in new york city

how i pictured my life in paris

July begins outside of a west village bar. I’m running late to meet Christine for dinner, flushed, and fresh off a month in paris. As soon as I see her standing on the sidewalk, I feel an instant sense of gratitude to be home.

We hug, and she asks how it feels to be back.

I describe this feeling of disorientation that I have been feeling since returning to new york: that the city is somehow more vivid upon arrival. Louder, brighter.

Christine tells me that she experiences this too every time she returns from europe. It becomes almost deafening when all the passing conversations, bits of gossip, pleasantries materialize from background noise to something discernible. In paris, I had the luxury of not knowing.

In A Creative Act, Rick Rubin describes how listening is one of the only pure forms of staying present. Whereas the other senses have mechanisms for turning off (like closing your eyes or mouth), your ears are an immutable witness to everything around you.

Theoretically I believe this to be true. But walk down any street in new york, and I can count on one hand the number of people I pass that aren’t either wired up or plugged in.

wired up !

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A trend I’ve noticed on my side of the internet is an aspiration towards “slow living”. The greatest luxury is a slow morning, the greatest ideal, a slow life.

Every time my screen time edges past 6 hours, I find myself fantasizing about the allure of a slow life. I’ll see a cool, low exposure montage of the slow living ideal, and be seething in envy: doesn’t this person have a job? How can one afford the luxury of hand whisking a matcha latte on a tuesday morning?

The way a slow life is constructed online has always felt to me to be either unattainable or unsustainable. It seems that in order to truly live a nara-smith/kendall-jenner coded life, I need to:

1. move to the english country side, learn to bake and ride horses

2. somehow also have enough money to afford slow consumption (aka exclusively wearing the row, khaite, toteme, by malene birger, etc)

the 'slow life'

My month in paris was meant to be an exercise in slow living. Excused from my social calendar, I was excited to indulge in the idyllic, slow morning aesthetic. Except in my fantasy parisian life, I forgot to factor in an office job, a laundry list of things to see and multiple visitors to host.

In other words, I am immensely grateful for my job, friends, family, and memories in paris, but I did not make a single matcha latte by hand.

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I watched this silly tiktok the other day where this guy declares to no one in particular that he’s going to “implement, you know, a slower walk”. He demonstrates his standard pace of walking, and then explains how he’s going to slow down to a leisurely strut. He’s home after all, and “only maybe saving five seconds.”

@robertoehidalgoo @robertoehidalgoo ♬ original sound - Robertoehidalgo

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It’s a completely inane video, but I’ll often catch myself hurrying around in my apartment for no reason at all. Why are we all rushing around with no where to be?

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In my experience, living a slow life is an ambitious undertaking if you’re already ambitious and live in an ambitious city. I’m not going to sit here and say to you “we all need to sloooow down!” when the default pace in new york is rushed and running 10 minutes behind.

In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson talks about the idea of “leaving a space empty so that God could rush in”. It’s less religious than it is philosophical — she likens it to growing bonsai, where you “often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine”. I like this framing because it re-focuses less on the pace (which is harder to control), but more on the systems and environments we have in place to enable a slow and expansive life.

A year ago, I wrote about a particularly depressing streak of missing flights out of jfk. Deep down, a part of me has always enjoyed the thrill of doing things at the last minute, but as I’m getting older I’ve started to understand the appeal of a relaxed airport experience. I’m not quite the person that gets to the airport 4 hours early (yet) but I haven’t missed a flight in recent memory, so there’s progress.

I’m reminded of another japenese concept I learned recently, yutori, which strives for spaciousness as the ideal. There’s a focus on daily well-being that comes from having time on your side and creating space for peace of mind. I like spaciousness rather than slowness because it feels like an intention rather than an aspiration.

Speaking of “slow”, I’m embarrassed to admit that this piece has taken me over a month to finish. Part of that is due to my own inconsistency with writing and part of that is that it felt like the whole time I was revving my tires in mud.

But in that time I’ve collected a few visuals and ideas that might help you live more slowly, mindfully, and expansively:

• noticing color on a commute home. try picking a color (blue) and seeing how many blue things you can find

  

• getting to jfk early and working at your gate rather than missing your flight

• rather than dinner and drinks, running slow errands with your friends as a way to hang out. (a friend and i recently spent a saturday night trying on matching shoes, waiting out the rain and picking up her in-store pick-up at sephora. and let me tell you, it was so much fun)

  

  from maybe baby

• since paris, i’ve started to get back into reading as a replacement for doomscrolling; here’s what i’ve read so far and who/what inspired the recommendation:

• taking your friends up on random recommendations shortly after they get recommended

  

  that’s all for now, let me know what you think!

  xx tina