on slowness, taste, and living well

slowness as a manifestation of presence

by Anna Weyant, 2022

Whenever I sit down at a new place, I take a few moments to observe what is going on around me—sounds, sights, smells, people. A vibe check, so to speak. This practice helps me distill my taste, because when I am present enough to listen to my body, it tells me what I like and what I don’t like. Developing taste is a matter of developing presence, because taste is a collection of things that bring you joy. The inputs that light you up—that make you feel something. But you can only tap into those feelings when you’re paying attention—when you’re in the moment, tuning in.

This practice also helps me hit pause on what otherwise feels like a constant stream of rapidly passing flashes of life. When I stop to observe, I hone in on a single frame: the moment I am in. I get to simply exist and observe. This is a microcosm of a larger practice I’m cultivating—one of slowness.

Isabel⚡️ @isabelunraveled

i’ve noticed the most effective people i know move with a certain *slowness* that is distinct from others. their slowness is a result of presence, care and intention. they don’t rush decisions. they take their time. they don’t move in haste, they move at a pace that feels right.

My yearning for slowness stemmed from an observation that the most effective people I know seem to move more slowly than everyone else. This seems counterintuitive, or at least it was to me—how do the people who get the most done, and do it best, move the slowest? Answer: because slowness is a byproduct of care and intention. When you operate with presence and awareness, you move more slowly, because you’re not thinking of the next moment—rushing there, mentally or physically. You are where you are and you’re savouring it.

slowness as a gateway to yourself

I wasn’t even aware of my own haste until I noticed how rushed my actions and decisions were compared to the slow-yet-high-performing beings I was around. By moving in haste, I was foregoing access to myself. By always rushing, I never gave my intuition the chance to float up to the top of my awareness. I was moving so fast that my gut feelings were being squashed by thoughts about where I wasn’t, where I needed to be, what I needed to do. The future was distracting me from the present, and in doing so, it was severing my connection to myself. This aligns well with my existing belief that impulse rises out of agitation (haste, fragmented attention, reactiveness) and intuition rises out of stillness (presence, awareness, slowness). Those who move slowly have a deeper sense of connection to themselves—they have access to their internal signal: their intuition.

feeling behind is a state of mind

It’s like the common cautionary tale that when you feel like you “don’t have enough time” for your meditation, or your workout, or whatever keeps you centered, skipping it only leaves the day more scattered. That extra ten minutes isn’t the problem. The problem is that you think you don’t have time to be present, to cultivate slowness. The secondary problem is that unless you take a moment to pause and remind yourself that the internal haste you’re responding to isn’t serving you, that feeling will permeate through your entire day. You’ll feel chronically behind all day long, no matter how “caught up” you get.

The antidote to feeling behind is to slow down, stop rushing, take a deep breath (or a few) and remind yourself that the best thing you can do right now is be in this moment. The solution to feeling behind is not to move faster and let the anxious thoughts pile up on top of each other, cascading into the moment and taking you away from where you are. This only heightens the feeling of being behind. The solution is to do the opposite of what your minds wants you to do: it’s to slow down.

time comes from within

This reminds me of a chapter in Gay Hendricks’ the Big Leap about “Einstein Time”: the idea that time comes from us—that when we are genuinely present, time collapses completely, beyond our ability to detect that it is passing at all. He compares this to the paradigm we all grew up believing—what he calls “Newtonian time,” which is the idea that time is a finite resource we live in a constant scarcity of:

“The Newtonian paradigm guarantees that you will always have a problem with time. Most people seem to live at the two extremes of the time continuum: rushing to stay ahead of the clock because they're busy, or stuck in boredom because they don't have enough to do.

At the heart of the Newtonian time crunch is a dualistic split: we are deluded into thinking that time is "out there, an actual physical entity that can put pressure on us "in here." In this paradigm, we think of time as the master and us as its slave. At the extreme, time becomes our persecutor, and we think of ourselves as its victim. Since time feels like an ever-present entity hovering in the background of our lives, we come to feel that we're victims of an entity that's always there, all the time.”

What he calls the Newtonian Time paradigm—where time is constantly controlling us in the background of our minds—is compared to Einstein Time, the idea that our perception of time drastically changes when our awareness flows out of ourselves and into the moment:

“Here's a practical example—recall Einstein's colloquial explanation of relativity: an hour with your beloved feels like a minute; a minute on a hot stove feels like an hour. If you are forced to sit on a hot stove, you become preoccupied with trying not to occupy the space you're in. You withdraw your consciousness toward your core, contracting away from the pain of contact with the stove. The act of contracting your awareness away from space makes time congeal. It seems to slow down and harden into a solid mass. The more you cringe from the pain, the slower time gets.

When you're embracing your beloved, though, your awareness flows in the opposite direction, toward space. When you're with your beloved, every cell in your body yearns to be in union with him or her. Your awareness flows out toward your periphery. You want to occupy every possible smidgen of space in the yearned-for present. When you're in love, you relax into the space around you and in you, and as your consciousness expands into space, time disappears. If you even remember to glance at a clock, you notice that time has leaped forward in great spurts. Entire hours can disappear in the wink of an eye.

When you're willing to occupy all space, time simply disappears. You're everywhere all at once, there's no place to get to, and everywhere you are its exactly the right time.”

The key idea here: when we are fully engaged in the moment we are in, time disappears. When we don’t want to be in the moment we’re in, or more commonly, when we are stuck in our minds and feel unable to break into the moment—time crawls by painfully. We flood our awareness into our minds instead of into our surroundings, making time solidify and slow down.

when we’re in the moment, we’re not aware of “time”

We are not aware of time when we are simply existing in it. It is only when we are out of the moment that we tune into whether we are “behind” or “ahead” of time. And hey, sometimes we do need to make sure we are “on time.” But our whole life does not need to be tainted by the tight grip we have on time, turning our knuckles white with stress throughout the day. We are better off being present and forgetting about it entirely in the moments where we don’t “have to be” anywhere.

flooding awareness outwards

Whenever I start to feel behind or overwhelmed, I (try to) take a deep breath and release a loud exhale. Through it, I imagine releasing all the stress and worry building up in my mind from feeling the need to “rush”. It’s a way to active my presence, my “inner time” (Einstein Time) instead of continuing to be enslaved by “outer time” (Newtonian Time). When I do this intentionally and early on enough, the build-up of stress disappears and I come back to where I am. If I fail to do this, I sentence myself to a day of being a victim to the unrest I’m letting brew inside me—persistently taking me out of the moment and making time creep by painfully and ineffectively. Flooding our awareness into space (i.e. bring our attention to the moment we are in) extends time and slows our inner clock down. Letting our awareness be yanked at by our mind, or an uneasy feeling we are attempting to ignore, only reduces the time we have access to.

early signs of haste

Upon reflection, there were many early signs that I had a predisposition to “rushing.” I would get a recurring piece of feedback from my teachers: they would tell my parents that I was a great student—attentive, inquisitive, studious—but my fatal flaw was that I always “rushed through my work.” I’d do it as fast as possible and never check it over. “If she could just slow down, all of her hard work would come to fruition,” they’d say. And here I am probably close to two decades later, still learning that lesson. Go figure.

I remember frequently getting different versions of that same cue from the adults around me—“slow down” “take your time” “don’t rush”. I now realize that what they were telling me was to be present. To pay attention to where I was. To dedicate my full focus to the task at hand instead of thinking about the next one. To embrace slowness.

presence unlocks our abilities

I used to do gymnastics, and I often reflect on how much more consistent I could have been if I had the mental fortitude and awareness then that I do now. I now see that the only time I would ever make a mistake or “mess up” something I knew how to do (i.e. a skill I had done a thousand times before) was by letting my attention fall away from the moment. Once we have practiced something enough times to master it, performing it well becomes purely psychological. It becomes a matter of keeping ourselves present enough to do it well.

Our coaches always told us to take a deep breath before a big skill—I now realize they simply wanted us to be present in that moment. Because we knew what to do: where to put our hands, where to look, where to put our feet. But if we were nervous about falling, or concerned with the next skill, we weren’t going to do it the way we always did. We would rush, lose our balance, put our focus in the wrong place, contracting our ability to perform. By going slow, we did what we needed to do. Going fast only creates new problems that slow us down or force us to start over entirely.

This is as true for everything else as it is for gymnastics—presentations, conversations, meeting someone new. It’s only when you’re out of the moment, thinking about how you might sound, be perceived, or appear—that you’ll make an impression that is out of character (it’s only when you think about messing up that you actually mess up!) Because when you’re not present, you’re not you. You are someone else trying to hold together a performance that comes as close to the real you as possible.

rushing breeds new problems

I’ve been learning this lesson viscerally through my yoga practice lately. Initially, when I started losing balance in a pose, I would yank myself in the other direction, throwing myself off even further. I did this a bunch of times before I realized that my reactive attempts to rebalance were causing my postures to unravel entirely. To correct myself properly, I needed to slow myself down, come back to the moment and then delicately pull myself back to center. I was falling out of the pose because I had lost focus—so the only way to correct it was to bring my focus back.

through presence, we feel our feelings

When we are present, we feel inside of ourselves when something is about to go wrong, or that it already has, and we’re able to fix it right away. Our off-feelings hold a signal, they are trying to tell us something. And they’ll keep trying until we listen—they’ll say: pay attention to me, or continue to suffer. When we attentively listen to our feelings, we quickly find their source and move forward smoothly. We then naturally move faster throughout the day because we are not distracted by those feelings. This is why the people who move the slowest actually move the fastest: they’re always present, so they always notice when something is off and they can correct it (gracefully, effectively) right away. Through tight focus, we sense what is happening, and respond calmly by tuning in to the moment.

slowly rebalancing

Slowness keeps us from over-correcting. When we notice a problem and reactively solve it, we usually create a new one. The idea is to slowly, gradually under-correct until we find our way back to baseline (just like in yoga!). It’s amazing how seamlessly this applies to solving most of our real-life problems:

1. Be present

2. Notice when something is off

3. Gently come back to present

4. Breathe

5. Lead with curiosity—examine the off-feeling carefully

6. Intentionally, slowly correct what went wrong

7. Refocus your attention on the moment

8. Check in with yourself to see if anything else feels off

9. If yes, repeat—if not, proceed

No knee-jerk reactions. No rushing. No haste. Just patient, juicy slowness. It’s where the best operate from, and that’s no accident. When we move slow, we think clearly. When we think clearly, we act in alignment with the deepest, truest parts of ourselves. We don’t make mistakes. We don’t do things we would regret. We don’t lose focus. We make decisions with our full attention. This way, we make decisions once and we don’t worry about whether they were “right” or “wrong” later on, because they had our full attention the first time. And if something does go wrong (as things often do!), we calmly fix them in that same state of presence—gently and with care—instead of reactively tugging ourselves in another direction, causing another problem to emerge.

to live well, go slow

I’ve learned that it’s when we feel most rushed that we need to move the slowest. When we try to do everything at once, we end up doing nothing well. Rushing doesn’t get you there faster. The real magic happens through moving with life instead of against it. Through slowness, we cultivate presence, and through presence we develop taste—we notice what makes us feel most alive, and we stay close to it. And what could be more lovely than a life centered around the things that make us feel especially alive? So, slow down. Breathe. Relax. Look up. Pay attention to how you feel, to how this moment feels. Savour it. Life is happening right in front of you—to see it all unfold, slow down and tune in :).

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PS—If you enjoyed this, you might also like a related essay I wrote called feel your feelings. You can find me on Twitter until the next essay, or in the comments here—I always deeply appreciate hearing how my words land with you all. Thank you for reading and have a lovely week ahead <3