I woke up at 6:30 this morning and laid in bed. The usual: scroll, read a text, count the minutes until the absolute latest I could remain in the sanctuary of sheets (7:15). Then the rest of the morning was rushed because I did that to myself.
Yesterday’s me knew this so she prepared lunches last night, which left morning-me to scurry around in a flurry, throwing on clothes, brushing hair and teeth, putting the waffle in the toaster and when it popped up still not quite done, letting it toast a while longer…forgot about it…burned it anyway, all while shouting for my daughter to get dressed and ready so we could leave.
When we were finally stepping onto the porch, I was stressed (& harboring residual frustration pent up from this week). As I was trying to lock the door while juggling a laptop bag, my tote, two lunch boxes and a scalding mug of coffee that kept burning my palms, I was hurrying her along shouting about how I was going to be late for work (again, my own doing of course).
But then I had this thought as we were shuffling down the front steps:
“Why are we constantly rushing everywhere? Why do we live life like a time lapse of clock hands?”
I thought about the bearded man in the oversized truck in the next lane over, yelling out the window at me for some unknown reason. I thought about the anxiety of waiting for a reply on a text and language that conveys urgency like ASAP and “jumping in the shower” (to which my partner always jokes, “Not too high!”). I thought about fast food, social media, Amazon Prime.
I, probably like most millennials, miss the 90s and early 2000s, before the emphatic tech boom that punctuated this world with too many exclamation marks. “FAST! CHEAP! EASY!” But at what cost is that convenience? We know it now: mental health, physical health, atrophying attention spans.
I miss the slow world.
And no world is without its problems, but I miss the world where I wasn’t constantly accosted by them, even when I took steps to avoid them while my brain took a breather. Why can’t social media have office hours? Why must the work or school day begin promptly at 8am? Why not 10 and gift back the sacredness of morning? Why can’t we shorten the length we’re cooped in cages and stretch the day like dough? Where hands remember the feeling of grass’ freedom and the exhale of an open sky? Are those things not also important? Not everything is about dollar signs, productivity and memorizing “historical” facts regurgitated on tests that are no measure of intelligence.
I don’t particularly know what this post even serves other than a safe container for thoughts and feelings. I feel like this world doesn’t have enough of those, and that is why I fell into the internet so hard when it debuted.
I needed a world of my own when the one I was told to inhabit didn’t fit.
Circa late 1990-something in the days of ExPage and Angelfire, I learned how to code HTML and began building my own worlds. Those skills are long gone now, as convenience has essentially bred them out of the majority and making websites is much easier these days (not a bad thing), but I can still remember a few things like <b> for bold and <a href = “(link here)”> for links. I still remember the name of the website where I taught myself these things: LisaExplains.
I found myself inhabiting spaces like LiveJournal and later purchasing my own domains as an outlet for my words, even if no one read them. It felt like refuge, a sacred space to which I would always belong. Even if no one saw it, it existed. Writing has always done that for me, affirmed my existence.
Back then, there was no insta-culture, far less comparison (or least not continually connected to it), and long-form content was king. I loved building in the digital to express various parts of me, and to a large extent I still do, or I wouldn’t be here, painting on this very canvas for all of you.
Self-expression is necessary, but it doesn’t happen urgently or instantly. It is an ever-changing kind of artistry.
It need not match anyone else’s, follow any set of rules, or adhere to the structure of whatever the current “culture” is. If anything, it should be “Here Culture,” that which we were always meant to exist within, that of being present in the pause and slowly consuming and creating beyond the scroll; of curiosity and asking “Where am I? Where have I been? Where am I going?”
In a world of my own nonsense (which somehow makes the most sense in the end; that’s a metaphor), I can make the pace as slow as I wish. What I create and share will never be rushed. I don’t think strong art ever is. Like life’s challenges and experiences, it must be slowly chewed, savored and digested.
I hope the future of our world is a return to this practice of contemplation and consideration (and I mean that far beyond slowing down, but in the largest sense of acceptance and evolving into a more loving humanity).
I hope the future of our world is many things: softer, brighter, filled with more pauses; that it becomes a meandering path—winding, bending, twisting—rather than the straightest, shortest line possible.
I don’t know when that may be, but I believe in its possibility. I believe in its inevitable existence as much as I believe in mine. I think the small steps taken now will get us there, one thoughtful pause for reflection at a time, as each individual rediscovers the stillness and wonder of their own and takes the miraculous risk of expressing it.
“Why can’t we shorten the length we’re cooped in cages and stretch the day like dough? Where hands remember the feeling of grass’ freedom and the exhale of an open sky?” - I LOVE this. I was just thinking this morning about how tired I am if the hustle, or perpetually trying to grind myself to the bone. I want slow mornings of boredom where I have time to think about writing and art without worrying about how paying bills and checking off everything that needs to get done.