In the early 2000’s when the slow food movement was established in the United States, and thus I first gained wind of it, I was ecstatic. Finally, I thought, people were interested in taking their time about eating…about anything. In what should have been a time of rapid advancement in my life, two years after my graduation from college, I was instead in a period of measured hovering. As I didn’t know what I wanted to move towards, there seemed to be no hurry to speed up the pace. Slow food accorded with the atmosphere in which I was living.
Slow food is about more than just countering the ubiquity and spread of fast food franchises. It is about taking pleasure in the preparing, cooking, and sharing of meals with friends and family. It is about considering where food comes from, the provenance and history of the food we eat, and its cultural embeddedness and stories. It is about learning and exploring these cultural histories of food, the connections and passing of foods and recipes between cultures, and the evolution or permanence of particular dishes. It is about developing and maintaining equitable, just food systems, recognizing the intersectionality of food with issues of race, gender, and class. It is an advocacy movement with no less a goal than to change the world. As Megumi Watanabe, President of Slow Food Nippon, has said:
We should keep reminding ourselves that this movement is for all humankind, therefore we need to make an effort to go beyond boundaries, to get out of our comfort zone.
Megumi Watanabe, 2022
Moving slow may actually get us somewhere meaningful faster.
My one-year old daughter is delayed. She is slower than most children to crawl, feed herself, and make a multiplicity of sounds. But she has a mild, serene personality. And she is markedly observant, careful, holds a knowledge deep in her eyes that I wonder at, so I don’t mind.
But I do mind. There is a shame in the slowness. Her daycare friend, who is one month younger than she is, is already taking his first steps. When I come to pick her up and the group is oohing and aahing at his efforts, I feel embarrassed for my sweet girl. I find myself justifying my own normalcy by explaining that my boys were already crawling around and cruising at this age. “I’m not worried about her,” I smile as I lift her up and turn towards the door.
But I am worried. Recently, she was assessed for Early Intervention and approved for services. While my first reaction was exuberance and relief that, finally, someone was going to help me help her, my second reaction was concern when I received her ‘scored’ results. While I believe in a wide range of ‘normal’ and that each child develops within that range at her own pace, it was difficult to see her scores so far beneath her peers. Worse, I felt guilt that she was being scored on speed, on the pace of her development, rather than on who she was, who I knew her to be. So much ego is wrapped up in the pace at which we move through this world.
But what if her slowness is an asset? What if it is an observational way of engaging with the world, a care with and for the world that others don’t have the capacity for? What if the skills she is developing in these areas are far ahead of others indeed?
I appreciate Early Intervention and I understand the necessity. Whatever I may think of my daughter’s strengths, she lives in a world which moves quickly and expects others to keep up, a world which necessitates processing large amounts of information quickly and shifting gears from one task or information dump to the next with ease. If I were to let her go at her desired pace, she will have lost this race by kindergarten already. The cost of moving slowly is high indeed.
Some of us are what are called slow processors. I have come at length to take on this term to describe myself, as it takes me longer to take in information, process it by appropriate means, and then finally and most slowly, respond. When we moved in recently and met one of our neighbors, she–after telling me they had three daughters–immediately divulged that her eldest was taking a year off, had struggled immensely with school last year and finally had been diagnosed as a slow processor. It felt to me a bit like the unburdening I had done at daycare by talking about my daughter’s exceedingly mobile brothers.
“Oh yes, I am a slow processor too,” I happily responded, pleased to find more of my kin. The neighbor looked surprised at my admission and asked, “oh, when were you diagnosed?” “I was never diagnosed,” I admitted, “I just realized as I got older that it took me longer to think about and respond to things. I’ve come to embrace it really.” She continued, passing over my comments, to lament the expectations of teachers, the homework assignments that were too far above an appropriate level, and the way the school system generally fails students.
Much of that may be true and, having been a high school teacher myself, I struggle with the way the system does and must streamline the education of highly particular individuals. But, independent of school, I have come to believe that slower thinkers are often deeper thinkers. I learned to make my own accommodations as I entered college without really realizing it. The day a class began, the day we were handed the syllabus with all of the course’s requirements and, often, the final paper assignment parameters as well, I would begin to think about that final assignment. This truly was a technique that enabled me to get along, indeed flourish, in college academia, but I was propelled more by a love of the questions themselves and the delicious length of time you could submerge in the processing, the thinking, the rethinking, the discovering and rediscovering, coming up finally from the depth with insightful, perhaps even profound, revelations, if you gave yourself the gift of an entire semester to respond to one question.
Often, though, there are many questions wrapped into one situation as with meeting someone, with meeting that someone time after time, with the feelings developing, and the falling in love being both fast and slow at the same time: the rapid heartbeat, increased pace of talking, the flood of feeling and desire, and yet, the way the moment itself slows to stillness, or as Nina Simone sang:
but tomorrow may never, never come.
Nina Simone, For All We Know
Is slow always an alternate to fast or could its antagonist be an expectation?
During the summer after my sophomore year in college, I was behind in credits. I had transferred away from an unhappy college situation and taken a semester off to help my father get his new business off the ground. When I returned to school, I felt an urgency to catch up. The need to graduate on time felt, oddly now as I look back, compellingly imperative.
I signed up for a couple of courses at Harvard Summer School, the courses chosen for no particular rhyme or reason other than my own interest, my own gut feeling that they may shed new light on previously unknown perspectives. The first course was a History of Science course titled Einstein, Darwin, and Freud. As with many things that I have begun to recognize about myself as I age, I can see the personal appeal of this course now with its crossing and connecting of disciplines. The second course I took was taught by John Stilgoe, a rather well-known figure in the history of landscape development. It was titled, confoundingly to me at the time, Crucial Issues in Landscape Development and Change from 1890 to the Present.
There are moments in life when your brain expands, the growth as dizzying as it is exhilarating. Professor Stilgoe’s course was one of those moments for me as he introduced a way of seeing the American landscape and its interconnected elements–highways, signposts, farms, malls, suburbs, billboards–and the reflection of these realities and dreams in poetry, media, films, and advertising. This was a class where we went seamlessly from looking at photographs of a highway roadside gas station to reading poetry by Donald Hall to considering 1950s advertisements about travel.
Beyond the indelible way this course altered my theoretical outlook on the world and imprinted itself on my future thinking, Professor Stilgoe’s class also pushed me into different ways of being in the world. He was continually urging us to walk slowly, even slower, slower still, not to be in a hurry to get somewhere, but to dawdle in the service of actually noticing how the world around us had come to be what it was and to ask questions of its current state and past development. Even with his repeated admonishments, it seemed a bit silly to me at the time. I was in a hurry, I did need to get somewhere, and honestly, I preferred running.
In 2020, as the pandemic stopped the world as we knew it and opened up new, uncomfortable ways of being in the world, walking became an increasingly popular activity. Walking became the only physical activity and outlet from home lockdown for many. Certainly for me. But now, as I suddenly had more time than ever to walk far and fast, I found myself walking more slowly. Each of the hundreds of times I walked around my neighborhood, my feet took longer and longer to pedal me forward. Once I knew every house, I slowed to know the placement of every window. Once I could recognize each window, I slowed to notice the location of trees and plantings. Once I began to remember the flora of my neighborhood, I slowed to watch a dragonfly in summer or the way breath dissolves in winter. I listened to hawks gliding, air conditioners humming, and sometimes–though not often–the occasional sound of a child laughing.
Michael Pollan first became interested in psychedelic therapy (the use of LSD, MDMA or psilocybin to treat depression, anxiety, or trauma) when a developmental psychologist he was at dinner with spoke of an LSD trip, explaining that it had enabled her to have a better window into the way children think. As infants cannot yet distinguish between what is or may be of greater importance to them, they observe everything in their world with equal fascination and initially take in information through all of their senses capturing the essence of a thing though not necessarily its details. Though I could never reach this way of letting the world wash over me, I came closer as my walking slowed.
The pandemic brought other, more global, slowdowns. As human activity such as driving, flying, and traveling decelerated, the natural world entered what some have termed an “anthropause.” Though the assumption may be that the results of this pause would be entirely beneficial to other species, the reality is more complex. Habitats highly influenced by human behavior, such as coral reefs, began to improve–water quality enhanced, fish became more dense, and biological diversity on the reef increased. In northern California, white-crowned sparrows began to sing at lower frequencies, bettering their ability to communicate to potential mates and assert their territory. However, the slowdown in human activity was not universally positive. The number of vehicle collisions with wildlife increased. As humans receded into their homes, animals used the roads more. Their altered use of space meant increased danger and more of it, once any bit of traffic reappeared.
So often, slow has a negative connotation–your computer is slow; traffic is slow; your start to your career is slow; your progress is slow; the economy is slowing–but the reality is not binary, not clear at the outset. We all know the fable of the tortoise and the hare, but it is worth thinking too about slow altogether separated from fast, not as an alternative, not in a race, but as its own way of being in the world.
The idea of reincarnation is intriguing. I’ve felt, especially with my children, that they contain multitudes, depths of soul, and it is hard to know where it comes from. If reincarnation were the case, then would those who have lived many lives and learned be the faster-paced current humans or the slower ones?
I have moved slowly through this world. Everything about my life has been slow: slow to find my professional self, slow to have my first sexual experience, slow to have children…or maybe late is the word one would more likely use. But late for what? When I was younger, I was worried that if I rushed into life I would just go through the motions rather than figuring it out. I don’t pretend that I could figure life out now, but I do believe that being slower has made me more apt to trust the process of life. When you move slowly through life, you caress its edges, watch its rivers fade from twinkling with light to rushing black, listen to both its ponderous creep and blistering spin, pause after the delicate intensity of a kiss, knowing that slowness is a way, slowness can be the journey and not the other way around.
across between and beyond 