I write this note mostly to add the “slowness” tag. I’m also writing this on the backup laptop, an old ultralight ThinkPad Carbon thing, in the web editor, and it looks a bit odd, so it may post the same way. I keep this laptop downstairs, with a laptop board my kid got me for Xmas a couple of years ago – the idea being, I guess, that I could type in comfort in the evenings while downstairs on the sofa in front of the tv with a glass of something cheerful, if I wasn’t feeling like writing in the notebook.
I’ve just booted up this machine and spent an hour running updates, because I haven’t picked it up in some months, and right now I could use the extra keyboard time to get things done. This obviously sounds like the antithesis of slowness. Slowness came to me this morning when I saw that new Nordic Kitchen post. And again when I shut down the main machines at 4pm to spend ninety minutes potting and sowing plants. Gardening is part of a therapeutic recovery practice: earbuds in, you can’t do or think about much of anything except what you’re doing. And you can’t do it fast. You can’t roast coffee beans fast. I’ve been training myself back to slowness.
Slow cinema has been an interest of mine for years: it demands long focus and long engagement. I suspect that years of listening to long ambient and experimental music pieces put me in the frame for slow cinema. I also suspect that it was subconscious antidote dosing for a work life that moved very fast – #1000mphClub.
Work is gearing up again, and there’s a chance or two that it could get faster. I never want to go at 1000mph again – by the end of 2019, possibly the busiest work year of my life, I was an absolute zombie husk. I want to go at things with more intention. Which finds me jotting this note to myself on the sofa at 10pm. And to imagine what a slower life looks like. Ideally while still producing the same amount of work, but in a more sustainable way.
So. Slowness will be a tag here, as I think about slowness (and, probably, “time pressure,” thanks Tarkovsky and Schrader) in relation to the creative life.