What Slow Living Means to Me

When I first heard the words slow living, I imagined something beautifully unrealistic.

Quiet mornings. Homemade bread. Linen dresses. A garden overflowing with herbs. Long lunches under a tree and apparently nobody having an appointment at three o’clock.

It looked lovely.

It also didn’t look very much like real life.

Real life has laundry.

It has emails, shopping lists, deadlines, family schedules and dinners that somehow need to appear every evening whether you feel inspired to cook or not.

Some mornings begin peacefully.

Others begin with someone asking where something is while you are still trying to remember what day it is.

So if slow living requires life to be permanently calm, I am definitely doing it wrong.

Thankfully, I no longer think that is what it means.

Slow living isn’t necessarily living slowly

For me, slow living has become much less about speed and much more about attention.

There are days when I work quickly.

There are busy weeks when the calendar is full and everything happens at once.

That doesn’t mean slow living has disappeared.

Instead, I try to create small moments when I deliberately pay attention to what I am doing.

Making coffee and actually sitting down to drink it.

Opening the windows in the morning and noticing the air.

Walking into the garden to pick basil for lunch instead of treating it as another task.

Putting my phone somewhere else during dinner.

Looking at the sky when I go outside.

None of these things takes very long.

The difference is simply that I am there for them.

Finding beauty in ordinary life

I used to think beautiful living required beautiful circumstances.

A holiday.

A lovely restaurant.

A perfectly decorated room.

A special occasion.

But the older I get, the more interested I become in ordinary days.

Because ordinary days make up most of our lives.

A Tuesday morning deserves good coffee too.

Dinner doesn’t need guests before you put flowers on the table.

You don’t need a special occasion to use the plates you love.

And you certainly don’t need to wait for a holiday to sit outside and watch the sunset.

Sometimes creating a beautiful moment requires almost nothing.

Move lunch outside.

Put the peaches in a pretty bowl instead of leaving them in the shopping bag.

Cut a few sprigs from the garden.

Light a candle at dinner.

Open the window while you cook.

Tiny things.

But tiny things repeated over years eventually become a life.

Seasonal living helps me slow down

One of my favourite ways of connecting with slower living is through the seasons.

Summer has tomatoes, peaches, apricots and long evenings.

Autumn brings mushrooms, chestnuts, soups and the first cool mornings.

Winter makes us turn inward.

Spring slowly brings everything back to life.

Eating and living according to the season gives the year a rhythm.

You begin to look forward to things again.

The first strawberries.

The first tomato from the garden.

The first evening warm enough to eat outside.

The first soup when autumn arrives.

Perhaps anticipation is part of pleasure.

When everything is available all the time, nothing feels particularly special.

Slow living isn’t about perfection

This is important to me.

Slow living can become another aesthetic to achieve.

The perfect kitchen.

The perfect garden.

The perfect morning routine.

The perfect sourdough loaf sitting on a perfectly wrinkled linen cloth.

But perfection is not slow.

Perfection is exhausting.

My table is sometimes messy.

Plants die.

Dinner occasionally comes from whatever I can find in the refrigerator.

There are mornings when coffee is drunk while standing up.

There are days when I spend far too much time looking at a screen.

That doesn’t mean I have failed at slow living.

It simply means I am living.

I don’t want slow living to become another standard against which I measure myself.

I want it to be the opposite.

A reminder that life doesn’t need to look perfect to feel good.

Choosing what deserves my attention

Our attention is probably one of the most valuable things we own.

And everyone wants some of it.

Phones vibrate.

Notifications appear.

There is always another video, another article, another piece of news and another person somewhere doing something we apparently need to know about.

I don’t want to reject technology. I enjoy it, and much of my work and creativity depend on it.

But I also don’t want to reach the end of a beautiful summer evening and realise I spent most of it looking at other people’s lives.

Sometimes slow living is simply putting the phone down.

Not forever.

Just long enough to return to your own life.

My version of slow

My slow life is not especially glamorous.

It looks like coffee in the morning.

Herbs growing near the kitchen.

Seasonal food.

Walking around the garden to see what changed overnight.

Cooking.

Writing.

Setting the table even when the meal is simple.

Leaving room for a conversation.

Sometimes doing absolutely nothing useful.

It also includes work, deadlines, unfinished laundry and all the normal chaos of family life.

Both can exist together.

That may be what slow living means to me most of all.

Not escaping ordinary life.

Not creating a perfect one.

Simply paying enough attention to realise that ordinary life can already be beautiful.