Slow start to the week

After the bustling weekend of driving and talking and food and art and Art and people and music and talkingallatonce and subways, taxis, restaurants, walking, talking, driving… I finally slept soundly, and woke distantly aware of the rise and fall of my breathing long before I reluctantly joined it, disturbing its patterns like splashing about in what had been a still pool. But it’s very quiet here this morning. My housemate is sleeping in on this President’s Day holiday, and outside I hear no cars or activity whatsoever. It’s snowing, and the snow is doing its slow, pointillist work of silencing all.

I describe the weekend as bustling, but there were long unhurried spaces for conversation throughout. Our host for the weekend, Elck, has often blogged about slowness, about slowing down to pay attention and savor the moment or a piece of writing. And though we were a rather noisy, vocal and frequently rude! bunch – we were not sitting around chanting OM or quietly contemplating lines of poetry – there was never any sense that we were on a schedule to, say, eat breakfast and be at the park by a certain time and at the museum in the next time interval. Certainly hunger pangs and caffeine deprivation drove certain exigencies, but then there’d be more time to savor the food and banter and ideas and laughter. Tables were reluctantly left only in consideration of the wait staff and other patrons waiting in line.

Now I am home. I have work deadlines to tackle. My housemate has gotten up and is complaining of “snow again?” and wanting to talk, and the dog is running around madly. I have to clean up the dishes in the sink, make another cup of tea, pop in my contact lenses, get to work.

This morning I found a post from last summer that Elck wrote on slowness, on the kind of experience he wanted his blog posts to be for his readers. I’ll leave off, then, with a quote from that post:

“…I want them to be an exercise in slow reading for my community of readers, a way of savoring pleasures together, as if we were face to face, and friends.”