Newsletter #1: A thanks & response to your response.
Since we sent the word out that we were launching a joint venture, the feedback has been brilliant and instant. So quick! Pop pop pop, like like like, little bubbles of dopamine! Emails to our new email address! Questions about how to slow down not only in theory but in practice! An invitation to do a talk on slowness next weekend! Wow!
Thank you all so much for your heartwarming words, thoughts and questions. We are so touched by how much this has resonated with all of you. We really deeply felt the urgency and need behind each email, and wanted to answer every question individually and say yes and answer concisely to everything everywhere all at once. We slept on it.
The next morning we looked again and realised what our brains were experiencing, and why launching this project is going to be so hard! Speed and instant reward is so hardwired into our brains that half the work at the Slow Work Garden will be trying not to be co-opted into accidentally and ironically trying to design a ‘quick fix for speed’. We realised we should be wary of subconsciously working with rather than against the impulses of productivity and quick work – so, we decided not to answer each email individually but instead to take the time and care to write a more deeply thought-out response to your messages and thoughts in the form of our first newsletter.
If we wrote an answer to each email saying something like ‘in practice, slowing down is X Y Z (going to bed earlier, having fewer meetings, working a 4-day week)’, you might go away and live that answer until you found it too loose or too rigid or not enough cash or too much time, until you found slowing down as a whole not right for you. You might think, ‘so much for slowing down’ and shift back into your typical gear.
So there is a tension in our work. This tension is what we mean and intend to sit with at The Slow Work Garden when we talk about ‘the paradoxically urgent need to slow down’. It’s a paradox because we need so desperately to do it, but yet doing it too quickly would kill it. The answer would become the death of the question and there’d be no poetry, no discomfort, no magic in it at all.
What if we learnt to slow down?
We don’t know.
Uncertainty is so hard to live with in a world obsessed with cohesion and categorisation and clarity. Growing up in the paradigm of Western philosophy, we are asked over and over to don a critical hat when faced with a tensioned or complex idea. To spend time picking it apart so that a ‘simple true thing’ can emerge, as if we could solve it if we could only see it. However, in a world of complexity and massive problems, this mindset can make a mockery of the systems we live in and how difficult it can be to detach and forge your own path.
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
In our conversations, we have spoken a lot about the idea of surrendering to an idea or a question, of trying it on for size and living with it before working out what feels right and what doesn’t quite fit. Good questions aren’t comfortable to live with. They are like lifelong elders that provoke and guide and soothe and ask existential things of you. Good questions open you up and turn you inside out and gut you, and they keep you fresh and in awe, ready to be enchanted. They also keep you morally switched on to your impact in the world – which is the very thing the world needs from us right now.
How can we slow down in practice? We aren’t sure. Lucy has the thought that it could be like a series of tiny resistances to speed and to everything we have been taught is true. Sophie feels it lies somewhere murky in a deepening and widening pause before a choice is made. Maybe it’s a bit of both. Perhaps those are two ways of saying the same thing. Really we have no idea, at least not a fixed one. But isn’t it a great question?
We’ve both been trying to live this question, separately and together in different ways, within and without organisations, for quite a while now – and we have developed some practices that we are finding useful, both in resisting the urge to speed up, and in the art of slowing down. As we continue to practise practices of slowing, we’ll write about them with all the reflexivity and respect for tension we can muster.
For now, our ‘answer’ to these emails is not an answer at all but an invitation to live the question with us: What if we learnt to slow down? Perhaps, one day, we might find ourselves living into the answer.
Our first action inquiry will take place from 15th February to 12th April. Head over here to find out more and express interest in taking part.
If you’re interested in getting notified about slow newsletters from us from time to time, email us at hello@theslowworkgarden.com to let us know, and we’ll pop you on a mailing list.