On going slow
Bumps on leaves made by an unknown insect. Glimpses of hidden faces on craggy, mossy trees. The way the light shines through scraps of bark peeling from the trunk. Well-camouflaged tiny birds rustling in the bushes. Pieces of litter hidden beneath leaves that need picked up before they harm another living creature. The rustle of a mammal in the undergrowth – unidentified but when I stop and listen, it’s possible to tell their rough size and the direction they’re moving in.
All of these are things that I’ve noticed by going slowly.
By moving at a pace that accommodates lots of breaks. By stopping and sitting or sometimes just standing and looking at my surroundings. By working with whatever my body needs because I know that if I rush things or push things too far, the pain will come at some point, somewhere.
On a recent multi-day trek, I was carrying a heavyish pack with sleeping bag and food for the first time in a while. Compared to the majority of other walkers on the same route, I went at a slowish speed. The weight of the pack essentially meant that I just had to respond to what my shoulders and hips were telling me.
I walked at my body’s pace and in doing so, I feel like I simultaneously moved away from a view of looking at nature which is about doing outdoor activities in a certain timeframe or speed. For me, this view of spending time outside feels linked to quite an extractive way of looking at things – not quite the same as but associated with the idea of ‘conquering’ nature. It feels one-sided, positioning ‘nature’ as a monolith from which to get something from, rather than a multitude of plants, microbes, other animals and more that we are always already in relationship with. Embracing slowness felt like the start of making that relationship something more like community.
That doesn’t mean that going slowly is always easy. There’s been plenty of times where I wanted to press my body onwards and upwards. The language of bodies is often the language of winning, completing, competing, challenging. Conforming whilst also being the best. The body is treated as something to be mapped and wrangled. But landscapes can be known in other ways – they can be discovered and tended softly and slowly.
Even writing this piece took longer than I thought it would. There were tears and frustrations on the morning I sat down to write. Why had I woken up feeling like even breathing hurt? Why hadn’t I been able to get up for hours after my alarm rang? Why doesn’t my body fit the shape of the holes prescribed to us? Why do I lose something of myself when I do try to fit into these shapes?
And I do lose something. I feel bad about not being able to do things in the same way as other people, especially other people my age when I am perceived as ‘fit’ and ‘healthy’ (not that those are neat, discrete, unchanging categories anyway. Quite the opposite). But I also gain something too – sometimes, I think I am lucky in a certain respect in that my body kind of forces me to opt out of the ways we are conditioned to think about ourselves and our relationships with nature and other non-human animals. It gives me a different relationship to spending time outdoors and to nature in so-called domestic spaces too.
It might not always be a choice but there is a beauty in going slow. And even more than that – there’s an invitation too. One to think differently about my way of sensing and experiencing the world, and my way of living in it. Often, I want to rush towards a different future but I think that slow languidness might be an inherent part of the path to get there.