The Permission to Be Slow

There is a quiet shame that comes with being slow at things in a world that rewards speed.

I have felt it for years and not quite named it. The pause before I send a message I have been thinking about. The week I take to answer a question someone wanted answered in an afternoon. The book I have been reading for two months because I keep going back to underline things.

In a different century I would have been called thoughtful. In this one I am told, gently, that I should try to be more responsive.

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What strikes me about the demand for speed is how rarely it is justified. Most of the things people want answered quickly are not actually urgent. They are just easier to deal with quickly, before they pile up, before they cost the asker any patience.

The cost of my slowness, in other words, is mostly other people's patience. Which is a real cost. But not the only one in the equation.

The other cost — the one nobody talks about — is what gets lost when I answer immediately. The half-thought, the wrong instinct, the polite version of a real opinion. The reply I sent in three seconds because the messaging app made it socially uncomfortable not to.

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I am trying to give myself permission to be slow. Not as a stance against speed, but as a defense of the things speed makes impossible.

It is hard to write a sentence quickly and have it be the sentence you meant. It is hard to understand a person quickly and have the understanding hold up six months later. It is hard to know how you feel about something quickly, and most of the times I have tried, I have been wrong.

So I take longer now. I let messages sit for a day. I read books at the pace they ask to be read. I think about what someone said before I respond to it, even if the silence is uncomfortable.

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People sometimes find this rude. I understand. The norms of the moment are not on my side. But the alternative is to live in a permanent state of slight inaccuracy — always almost-meaning what I say, almost-feeling what I claim to feel, almost-understanding what someone just told me.

I would rather be slow than almost.

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A friend once told me that the most important question in any relationship is how fast does this person want me to be? — and that mismatches there cause more friction than almost anything else. I think she was right. I am trying to find the people whose pace is something like mine. Slow morning calls. Long letters. Conversations that pick up where they left off three weeks ago, as if no time had passed at all.

There is a whole life available at that speed. Most people miss it because they were going too fast to see it was there.