The Things We Notice Only When We Slow Down

There is a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with work. It comes from hurrying, from moving through the day as though it were a corridor between more important rooms.

Most of us know it. We eat lunch while answering messages. We walk to the station with our eyes on a screen. We listen to a friend while quietly planning what we will say next. We arrive at the end of a week and struggle to remember a single moment from it, not because nothing happened, but because we were never quite there when it did.

The walk I had stopped seeing

For several years I walked the same route to work each morning, fifteen minutes from my front door to the office. I could have told you how long it took to the minute. I could not have told you a single thing about what I passed on the way.

Then, one spring, I sprained my ankle. For three weeks I had to walk that route slowly, with a stick, at about half my usual pace.

It was like walking through a different street.

There was a house with a blue door and a brass knocker shaped like a hand. An elderly man fed sparrows from his window at exactly the same time every morning. A gap in the buildings, just past the bakery, gave a sudden view of the hills, green and far away, that I had walked past hundreds of times without seeing.

There was also the bakery itself, where the woman behind the counter, it turned out, knew the name of almost every customer who came in.

None of it was new. All of it had been there the whole time. I simply hadn't been going slowly enough to see it.

Hurry is a habit

We often think of hurry as something the world does to us. Sometimes it is. There are deadlines, bills and responsibilities that don't wait.

But a lot of our hurry is habit, a pace we keep up even when nothing requires it. We rush through the washing-up, the walk home and the bedtime story, as though there were a prize for finishing early. We are always on our way to somewhere else.

The trouble is that "somewhere else" never arrives. When we get there, we hurry on to the next thing.

Small ways to slow down

Slowing down doesn't require a retreat in the mountains or a dramatic change of life. It can begin with very small things:

• Do one thing at a time, even for just a few minutes a day. Drink a cup of tea without your phone and taste it.
• Take the long way occasionally. Walk a different street, and notice one thing you haven't seen before.
• Listen to finish, not to reply. Let someone complete their thought before you prepare your answer.
• End the day by naming three small things you noticed or were grateful for, such as the light at the window, a kind word or a good meal.

None of these will change your life overnight. But practised gently, they change the texture of a day, and days are what a life is made of.

What we already have

My ankle healed. I went back to walking at my old speed, and, I'll admit, for a while the blue door and the sparrows faded from view again.

But not completely. Every so often, I slow down on purpose. I look for the gap between the buildings and the hills beyond it. They are always there, patient and green, waiting for anyone with time to notice.

We spend so much of our lives looking for something more, more time, more success, more happiness. Sometimes the more we are looking for is already here, in the ordinary moments we keep rushing past.

All we have to do is slow down enough to see it.