On Being Slow

The world seems to reward speed, and yet the things I love most about being alive have been slow.

The rise of bread. The turning of a page. The way a friendship deepens over decades, not months. The sentence that took a week to arrive and, when it finally did, was exactly right.

Slowness is not laziness. It is a kind of listening.

I have started keeping a small notebook of things that took their time. A pear tree that fruited only in its seventh year. A story I could not write until I was thirty. A forgiveness that arrived, one quiet afternoon, without my having asked for it.

Perhaps this is the whole practice: to be slow enough to notice, and patient enough to let the noticing become something worth keeping.