The Need For Slowness

"Wonder - is not precisely Knowing." Emily Dickinson

(art by Felicita Sala)

I remember family vacations from my childhood where my parents would drive us in a mad rush to “see everything.” In this attempt to “see everything,” I experienced mostly exhaustion. I appreciated very little since it was all a kind of blur of of tourist sites. I get that my parents thought that we might never come back to a place so we needed to make the most of it, but for me, the most is to experience a few things more deeply than to rush from shallow dippings here and there.

For as long as I can remember, I have been someone who likes to take a more leisurely pace, to actually see, experience and be in a place. I prefer to ask locals what they recommend as far as museums, places of interest or restaurants to eat in. I have never been disappointed when I have. Unlike my parents, I don’t rush about but often take time to sit in a park or in a cafe or coffeeshop to just people watch, think and jot down things in my journal. It allows me time to process what I am experiencing. And the older I get, the more I want things to slow down.

One of my favorite filmmakers is Hayao Miyazaki, who is best known for animated movies like Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro. In an interview he spoke about how his films incorporate the Japanese concept of Ma, which is defined as an emptiness, a gap, a pause, a rest or a balance.

“The time between my clapping is Ma,” Miyazaki said, “If you just have nonstop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension.”