A first attempt at crystallising slow work practices
What is ‘slowness’? What does it mean to ‘slow down’ as a practice? We constantly come up against the idea or belief that slowing down is “just” about dropping things off your to-do list, resting more, becoming less busy, taking longer lunch breaks, producing less. It’s an embedded part of our brain conditioning to think in binaries and opposites – like, slowing down is the opposite of going fast or progress or getting stuff done – but this type of thinking can feel like both a symptom and upholder of speed in our worlds today.
We think these more literal, practical definitions of ‘slow’ are only one small aspect of what we are starting to understand about the practice(s) of ‘slowing’ or ‘slowing down’. When we talk about a practice, we mean something more like a ritual that is embedded in the everyday – rather than a one-off. Attending a breathwork retreat once is not the same as weaving breathwork into your daily life. Practising something is living it: this is the work.
Slowing down is not necessarily just about pace, but also about the quality of attention, the spaciousness of feeling, and the type of presence or awareness state you’re in. If slowing down is a ‘series of tiny resistances’, as we mentioned in our first newsletter, then there must be many tiny and large practices that go along with the resistance. Resistance itself is an umbrella practice.
We’ve collected some of the practices we have identified through our work under several themes and, although the list is in no way exhaustive, we hope you might find seeds of inspiration for some rebellion against speed, whatever that looks like for you. The practices here are thematic, and each is embedded within the others. We’ve gathered them and grouped them into categories with working definitions – although, in truth, the categories all bleed into each other and could be cast in a million different lights. We have also set these themes in an order that felt right to us, but it is not a set process to follow.
We’re working with words and phrases and language from different sources which we feel hold meaning and feel generative, and weaving these with language of our own experimentation and play. Wherever we can, we will credit the person or organisation whose work we’re drawing from and building on.
The practices, as they stand now…
Developing pause
A constant practice of both finding and/or creating moments of stillness and slowness in your everyday life and work. The practice of noticing within those moments in order to see, think, feel, hear and understand things in a new or deeper way. Disrupting the impulse to speed up.
Embodying knowledge
A constant practice of healing the ruptured connection between mind and body, in resistance to the dominant ‘Western’ culture of separation and opposition. Developing an understanding of different bodies’ languages in order to take good care of self, community and the more-than-human world – as well as to work with intuitive, embodied knowledge. Healing trauma. Thinking about the ‘bodymind’*.
* We first came across the phrase ‘bodymind’ in Shayda Kafai’s work on Crip Kinship.
Doing the inner work
A constant practice of working with the complexities and contradictions within us, at the same time as working with the complexities and contradictions around us. Recognising that the problems we see ‘out there’ are also ‘in here’. Radically unlearning, and lovingly re-parenting ourselves. Going inside out.
Grieving
A constant practice of acknowledging death and grief as a way to reconnect with life. Embracing endings and periods of slow, as well as beginnings and continuations. Knowing when to say no, when to let go, and allowing the sadness to come in when you do. Valuing impermanence. Shadow-gazing and composting.
Playing with success
A constant practice of broadening how we understand and attribute value to things. Disentangling our senses of self and worth from our learned definitions of success and from our ability to produce. Letting go of growth as our most important metric, and placing health and wellbeing at the centre. Quality over quantity.
Living the questions*
A constant practice of uncovering and asking our most important questions and living and working into them. Holding answers and outcomes lightly and finding comfort, guidance and possibility in not knowing. Being open, patient and present. Valuing emergence.
* ‘Living the questions’ came originally from Rainer Maria Rilke’s collection ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ (letter seven). The idea was developed further by Krista Tippett in her On Being series.
Seeking out connection and community
A constant practice of seeking out life-affirming connections and community. Holding the power of what you share, how much and with whom. Talking to the right people at the right moment. Co-learning and co-creating.
Dancing with definitions
A constant practice of trying on new ideas and experiencing different ways of knowing and being. Bringing our attention to the expansiveness of things and surrendering to the possibility of multiple truths. Telling stories and working with more than words. Resisting the urge to name and define and fix into place. Poetry over pedantry, language at the edge of language*.
* ‘Language at the edge of language’ was a beautiful phrase used by Gabriella Gómez-Mont during a session at Imagination Infrastructures 02 – A Time Between Worlds.
Prioritising pleasure
A constant practice of reclaiming the right to prioritise and ritualise pleasure in resistance to the impulse to pass over celebration and joy*. Laughing at the ridiculous irony of living in these times, in these contexts, and learning to find enjoyment in not-knowing. Reading the signals of pain and pleasure to do more things that nourish body, mind and soul.
* Pleasure as a right to reclaim comes from adrienne maree brown’s work on Pleasure Activism.
Flowing with living systems
A constant practice of co-designing and feeling ways to flow with (rather than against) living systems. Recognising the intrinsic value and intricate, ancient intelligences of the more-than-human world, and learning from it/them as kin. Unlearning our ‘main character’ energy and seeing ourselves as non-distinct from the world we live in.
Recalibrating time
A constant practice of finding ways to live and work in natural rhythm rather than linear, chronological time. Imbuing moments with a kairological sense of experience and presence. Working towards a long future from a rooted understanding of deep, long time. The long now and the big here*.
* We drew the phrase ‘the long now and the big here’ from Brian Eno’s work with the Long Now Foundation.
Tending foundations
A constant practice of allowing roots to develop slowly and deeply, without needing to disturb or uproot or show-and-tell. Valuing roots as well as fruits and tending to those roots with good soil and good fertiliser. Trusting that the right shifts are taking place at the right time at the foundations of ourselves.
Through writing about these practices, we want to start to bring your attention to the expansiveness of slowing down and its practical, spiritual, soulful, economic, political and organisational perspectives, among many others, on both micro and macro levels. So over the coming weeks we will publish a longer piece on each practice, writing about slowing down on both a personal and organisational level. Our aim is to return to these kaleidoscopically, to look at them through new frames depending on our own inner work, what we learn from working with others, as well as the broader cultural and systemic shifts happening in the world.
We would also like to convene a practice group to peer review these practices and build them out together — if you would be interested in this, don’t hesitate to get in touch at hello@theslowworkgarden.com.
Slow work practices in context
We also want to present these practices in the context of what speed has to do with oppression, and how time itself is a currency in our culture. ‘Time to spend’ is a deeply embedded part of our lexicon and social imagination, and it leaves us with a question about who has time and who is disenfranchised from the possibility of slowing down. This has to be central to our work.
In a Reimagining Economic Possibilities podcast, Kavian Kulasabanathan says that: ‘I think time matters because so much violence has emerged from poverty and inequalities of time, from impositions of time. I think so much of our liberated world can be approached through a simple question; who has time for what? The luminous abolitionist thinker, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, has this incredibly spacious definition of racism: 'racism is state-sanctioned production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death'. There’s so much to sit with here. But I think a loose definition invites us to see oppression or oppressions as diminishing of time, as threats, and shortcomings of time. I think this invitation asks us to perhaps see repair as the alchemy of time and justice. It invites us to see liberation, through institutions, through communal bonds, that help expand and enrich our time. To me, a liberated future is one with time. And everyone who inhabits it is sacred.’
So slowing down is deeply personal, deeply political and deeply cultural. It relates to our individual backgrounds and personal circumstances; it relates to our intersectionalities and the impact of speed on different communities; its roots are buried deep in the history of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. We cannot talk about slowing down without talking about it in all its complexity, especially as white women. We acknowledge the lack of time and lack of freedom to slow down, and also acknowledge our own privilege in being able to work with slowing down. We hope to lend our support in opening spaces for slow.
We also cannot talk about slowing down without talking about and drawing from the work of the inimitable Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry, an organisation who ‘create sacred spaces where the liberatory, restorative, and disruptive power of rest can take hold’ and whose work is ‘seeded within the soils of Black radical thought, somatics, Afrofuturism, womanism, and liberation theology, and is a guide for how to collectively deprogram, decolonize, and unravel ourselves from the wreckage of capitalism and white supremacy’. Tricia’s work is at the centre of what we do, as well as her recognition that just as systems of racism and patriarchy play out through our everyday ways of moving in the world, so does grind culture and the impulse to speed up without taking heed of our bodies’ whispers turning into screams.
“Remember, grind culture is not some pie-in-the-sky monster away from us. It is in our everyday behaviours, our lack of boundaries for ourselves and each other, the choices we make, and how we engage with ourselves and our community. We are grind culture. We must rest and dream.’ ”