Slow living doesn't mean an empty calendar
On the fullness problem, the wrong bolts, and a wedding dance I could completely botch.
Living by Making | Issue 14
At the Workbench
There is a crack in the dining table I am building for my daughter Elise as a wedding gift. I left it in the sun for a few hours this week while I was working on something else, and the resin expanded. A crack. After the router sled. After six hours of sanding. After resealing the whole surface, finding casters, cutting new bowties, and spending an hour on a FaceTime call with Elise deciding whether to use walnut or oak for them. The answer was oak, stained dark, which was not what I had planned, but it is what the table asked for. The crack will get fixed. It always does. But it is the kind of week where you put one thing down and pick up the next problem, and somewhere in there you are also visiting your mom at the nursing home and squeezing in appointments and coaching a track meet and counting the days with students down to three and a half because the rest of the week is the wedding and also learning a choreographed father-of-the-bride dance that your daughter made up and that you are absolutely going to fumble through in front of everyone and cannot wait to do anyway.
This is the week, all of it.
Under the Surface
Slow living has an image problem.
When most people hear it, they picture open mornings and unscheduled afternoons and a general spaciousness that this particular week, and probably yours, does not remotely resemble. The fantasy version of slow living is about fewer things. Less noise. Room to breathe. And if your life does not look like that right now, the implication is that you are doing it wrong, that you have not yet cleared enough space, that the slowness is still somewhere ahead of you waiting to be found. I want to push back on that.
The opposite of slow living is not a full calendar. The opposite of slow living is a scattered mind. It is the experience of being physically present in one moment while mentally running through fourteen others: the problem you have not solved yet, the thing you forgot to handle, the conversation you are dreading, the deadline moving toward you. You can have an empty afternoon and never actually arrive in it. You can have a week like this one, packed to the edges with difficulty and tenderness and hardware problems, and be completely present inside it.
The question slow living is actually asking is not: how do I have fewer things? It is: how do I stop living in every moment except the one I am in?
I think about this because there is a specific kind of overwhelm that comes not from dread but from abundance. From a week where every single demand on your time is something you chose, something that matters, something you would not trade. The nursing home visit is not a burden; it is time with my mother. The table is not an obligation; it is a gift I am building with my hands for someone I love. The dance is not a performance I have to survive; it is a memory that does not exist yet and will, because Elise made up the choreography and I said yes. And still, the week is genuinely a lot. Still, the mind wants to fragment and scatter. Still, there are moments when you are sanding the table but you are not really there, you are somewhere else managing the mental inventory of everything else, and the sanding is happening but you are not.
That gap between being somewhere and actually being there is what slow living is trying to close. Not by emptying the calendar. By teaching you to come back.
Studio Notes
What I’ve been making, thinking about, or working through.
There is a psychologist named Barbara Fredrickson who has spent her career studying what positive emotions actually do in the body and brain. Not what they feel like. What they do. Her research, which she calls the broaden-and-build theory, found something that seems counterintuitive at first: positive emotions, and gratitude specifically, physically widen the scope of your attention. When you are stressed or threatened, your attentional field narrows. You tunnel. You see the problem in front of you and the periphery disappears. That is useful if the problem is a predator. It is less useful if the problem is a bolt that is the wrong size and you need to find a creative workaround.
Gratitude, Fredrickson found, does the opposite. It opens the aperture. More of the moment becomes available to you. I think about that in the context of slow living because the crowded week is also, if you can stay in it, a genuinely beautiful one. The oak bowties I cut this week were the first I had ever done with that template. The FaceTime with Elise where we decided together what the table would become was not a detour from the work; it was the work. My mother still knows who I am, and she still laughs at the things she has always laughed at, and I got to sit with her multiple times this week. The dance I am learning, which I will certainly perform with all the grace of a man who has never done it before, came from my daughter’s mind and her hands, and it will be a story I savor for the rest of my life. She went to Nationals in competitive dance this year, that’s what she does, choreograph and dance. It is a small way I get to experience her talents in a different way.
The practice of slow living, in a week like this, is not about slowing down in the conventional sense. It is about using gratitude the way Fredrickson describes it: not as a mood, not as a denial of the hard parts, but as a way of widening attention back open so you can actually see where you are. The mess and the beauty are in the same room. Gratitude helps you notice both.
On the Table
A small, completable thing.
The honest inventory of one good thing. Tonight, before the week closes, name one thing that happened this week that could only have existed inside your particular, overfull, chosen life. Not the most meaningful thing. Not a peak moment. Just one real, specific thing that belongs to your week and no one else’s. For me, the FaceTime call where we decided on oak. The laugh mom still has. The thing someone said at the track meet. Whatever yours is, think about it for just a second. Not because it cancels out the hard parts, but because it is also true, and a tired mind has a habit of filing only the problems.
→ If something surfaces for you to consider, I would genuinely like to hear it. Hit reply or message me.
A Quiet Note
Unhurried Letters was built around the same idea this issue is based on: that slowness is not a pace but a quality of attention. A handwritten travel story, a fine art print, a recipe card, a postcard designed to arrive when the week is at full speed and ask you to slow down for ten minutes and actually be somewhere. If that sounds useful right now, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com.
Leave the Light On
Somewhere this week, in a living room, I learned the first few steps of a choreographed dance that my daughter made up for us to do together at her wedding. I will not get it right on the day. I will probably be off by a beat or two, maybe more, and everyone watching will know it, and it will not matter at all. Because what I will remember is learning it with her. The FaceTime sessions, the practicing, the laughing. The memory is already being made, in real time, in the middle of a week that also has a cracked table and wrong bolts and three and a half days left with students and a nursing home visit and a track meet. All of it at once. All of it mine.
This is what slow living actually looks like sometimes. Not empty. Full. And present enough to know the difference.
Thank you for being here. See you next week.
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Reference
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218
Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition & Emotion, 19(3), 313–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000238