Blog > In love with the slowness

Goethe in the Roman Campagna

Slowness is not something you understand quickly; to understand slowness takes years. Especially today, when speed enjoys a reckless, almost mythological adoration, understanding slowness has become even more a matter of time — of real time. You begin to understand slowness when you struggle to keep up with the new things that arrive, and that always arrive to say the same thing in a different way. Things arrive that solve the problems created by previous things, and so it becomes necessary to hurry. Things arrive that allow you to have more time to do other things, so that you no longer have excuses when they ask you, “Can you make it in time?”

Because it doesn’t matter if things speed up processes; there will always be other processes that fill the empty spaces. And in any case, we wouldn’t be used to empty time — we would try to kill it, because it is time we cannot conceive of, empty time, time of doing nothing, in which one is not because one is not doing. And so we try to kill it, that time already dead.

To understand slowness takes slowness

I do not have a good relationship with haste. Sometimes I like to wait — not to deliberate, to wait — to let things and solutions come to me like a light, automatic intuition. Although my work has given me the ability to find quick solutions in many situations in life, I love slowness and idleness, and I take pleasure in simply looking around, doing nothing. I like standing still and observing, perhaps accompanied by a cup of tea.

During my first work trip to Tunisia, what struck me most was the idleness of the men on Habib Bourguiba avenue, drinking tea for hours while watching the passersby, the cars, the sky, and the whole street. I would say to myself, ‘I wish I were like that.’ And it took me many years to learn how to truly enjoy it.

Slowness saves me. I am not interested when someone tells me, “I bought a coffee machine, now I can get it faster.” Why get it faster? Isn’t it beautiful to wait? I like slowness in the things I do because only in that way do I feel that I truly do them, whatever they may be. Eating, drinking, working, cleaning, thinking, waiting, taking, letting go.

We no longer have excuses — today we have all the time to be swift. And that is the problem. We have the time… to be swift.