Slow Living.. What, Why, How

Three years into this blog, now is a good time to pause and re-examine my personal meaning of slow living, as well as the whether/ why/ how of it.

The words ‘slow living’, magically conjure up a colourful set of visuals, memories and ideas in my mind.

School afternoons spent meticulously writing out different sets of home-work by hand, subtle differences in hand-writing over the pages betraying when the writer got bored or tired…

Strange box-like radios, and later, walkmans, and feeling like Her-Majesty-the-Coolness herself while wearing those head-phones, even if the songs playing were from Judwaa.

Eclectic colourful clothing representing various thoughtful presents from relatives and friends who were not quite sure what size you were, but who went into the market to find things which reminded them of you.

Staying up all night to finish that book. Underlining words you didn’t know. Looking them up in the dictionary… the musty smell of that hefty 1929 edition dictionary!

Long conversations with friends. Long walks. Long rides. Listening to music with one ear-phone each. Sitting under a tree for hours. Putting up plays. Rehearsing the same thing over and over and over.

Trips with cousins. Evenings with loved ones. Antakshari. Beaches. Wines. Sunsets.

Working on things which bring you alive. Losing a sense of time. Not losing a sense of innocence.

Walking hand in hand with life, making eye contact. Crying when it hurt.

Talking to friends and loved ones about how life hurts. Writing poems about it. Tons of poems. Feeling a deep sense of wellness and connectedness to the universe when something went well.. celebrating, writing down the date in your diary of when it happened.

The small things, the mundane- and attentiveness to it..

Connectedness with the universe. By being internally connected. In touch with what gives you energy. What makes you feel alive. Being fully there. In contact with the flow of life. Not sitting out, but also not rushing ahead.

There was nothing extraordinary about any of this when I was younger. Indeed, at the time I thought of it as simply ‘living’, rather than ‘slow living’. But a few things changed since then. The stage of life- more responsibilities, more variables, lesser time. Also the world itself- more information, more opinions, more noise..more activity, faster pace, and of course a culture of higher valuation of faster things.

And therefore what was earlier taken for granted must now be consciously built into one’s life. Indeed one must consciously create the structures of one’s life to keep some stillness, and some flow. How does one do that?

One approach is to try and re-create elements of the slower world in the here and now. Many of us do this in big and small ways- taking vacations with friends and family, reading at bed-time, sometimes re-designing life and careers to do more of what gives energy.

Another approach- not necessarily mutually exclusive with the first, and one which I personally still need work on- is to make ‘stillness’ the default ‘how’ even in the middle of cyclonic activity. To be conscious and calm in the middle of a traffic jam. To be still enough to know which way to run, when the roof is falling. This, I have found, is where an attitude of slow living is most needed.

In the last couple of years, being in the center of frenetic activity, I find slow living is not a luxury, but a necessity. It is not something one does in their free time. It is how one engages with the most urgent and important of things.

I remain extremely curious to learn from those who consciously design their lives to create more connection with life energy. Also from those who remain internally connected amid circumstances beyond what they may have chosen.

I remain convinced to stay on this journey. And move forward.. slowly 🙂