27/05/2026
I recorded this video last week in the mountains. Before I felt the grass, I was already walking across it. But I couldn’t feel it.
With the shoes on, I was moving fast enough. The ground was just a surface. It was reliable, unremarkable, and not much friction. This is what an armour does. It doesn’t stop you; it lets you keep going without having to feel the cost of going.
The speed and rushing we bring into our lives work the same way. Not as an avoidance in any simple sense, but a genuine adaptation. At some point, just like the ground was too much, the stillness also became unbearable. So we learned to move faster than feeling, and it worked, and we survived, and then we forgot we were doing it.
In the spaces I hold, I see this again and again. People arrive with the same type of rush from outdoors. Sometimes it’s physical agitation, but most of them sit down, settle in, and, from the outside, seem to be quieting down. However, something inside is still going. Still rushing.
The invitation to slow down lands differently for each person. For some, it surfaces as restlessness, maybe a need to name what is happening before it has finished happening. For others, it arrives as a wave of something old: grief, fear, a memory that was apparently waiting just beneath the pace of ordinary life. For others still, the slowness itself becomes the difficulty in itself, as though stopping were a kind of failure, as though not-doing were doing-it-wrong.
What comes up when we slow down is not created by the slowing. It was already there. Speed was just keeping it at a certain distance.
Read more in substack (Link in Bio)
