Slow living – Life is not a slow process chart
On slow living, puritanism, and why joy doesn’t only come in soft pastels
We've been exchanging letters on slow living, me and my friend Janina (who’s a wonderful writer—highly recommended if your Finnish isn’t too rusty). This is my letter to her, and the final part of our Slow living series.
Piikkiö, 31 May 2025
Janina! Thank you for your letter!
You know, we’ve wandered with this slow living thing for a few letters now, and still my hand swipes at a spiderweb when I try to grasp it. What’s left is a tangle of fibres with no shape.
But what is it exactly that bugs me? That’s such a damn good question. It’s easy to be smart(?) and critical toward this and that and the other, but when you poke around a bit deeper, things aren’t so straightforward.
Do misty contrasts and harmonious colour palettes and beautifully edited videos annoy me? No, they don’t. I’ve seen countless sunrises and sunsets—from the edge of a pasture, the border of a bog, the top of a fell, beneath the king rowan in the garden. Many of them have been just as misty and harmonious and dappled with moody light as anything on the feed. I’ve stood there so many times. But just as often, I’ve faced sleet straight from the depths of Mordor and frost that strips the last bit of skin off your cheekbones. Sometimes, that sleet and biting cold have made me feel more present than the golden glow of an August evening ever did.
Do I get riled up about selling? Not that either—actually the opposite. If someone has a patch of Sardinian cliff and a hammock under an olive tree to offer in exchange for money, why shouldn’t they tell us about it? Why would it be wrong for the child of someone leading silence retreats to have tomato pasta with parmesan and new wellies when the old ones have holes? Should the yoga teacher go mop office floors in the local glass-cube hell and offer asanas for free if there’s time and energy left, because hey, everyone else is suffering too and spiritual people should apparently live off holy spirit alone, since they’re just so goddamn spiritual? Shouldn’t they sell those things because they matter? Because silence and joy matter?
What bugs me is puritanism—the idea that there’s just one single right way. It turns life into a rulebook when it should be a poetry collection, and occasionally the instruction manual for a leaky moka pot.
A trip to a cloudberry bog might well fit the Insta-worthy concept of slow living: you can sniff the scent of marsh rosemary and peat, identify animals by their droppings, and fill your belly with the gold of the bog alongside a slice of fire-roasted squeaky cheese. But there’s an equal chance your boot gulps down a few litres of icy water from a boghole, and if your face wasn’t already swollen from the swarm of mosquitoes, midges, and horseflies, it will be once you stick your hand into a ground wasp nest by accident. And still, still—life whispers its truth there too. One sting, one breath, one blink at a time.
What bugs me is the over-intellectualising of everything—the overemphasis on thinking at the cost of experiencing and doing. We invent some optimisation framework or process diagram or method to create the illusion of control, and then slap on a good–bad value coating to compare ourselves and everyone else. You can’t spreadsheet life, no matter how convincing Excel’s illusion of control might be.
What bugs me is the attempt to manage life with airbrushed beauty. Life is still beautiful when your tea tastes like dirt and the cat throws up a hairball on the Persian rug in the living room.
If you want to write a book or renovate a house, the process includes all sorts. Daydreaming and rushing. Planning and doing. Failed experiments. Swear words. Quiet satisfaction. Broken MacBooks and table saws. That sense that everything is flowing and that absolutely nothing is flowing. Moments when you sit in front of the edited chapter or the finished floorboards and say to yourself quietly—damn, this is good.
We’ve talked about painting with a broad brush, and I think it applies to what I assume slow living is trying to reach for: joy, pleasure, awareness, the experience of being alive.
And those tend to show up most in places where no one has tried to manage them into a particular standard, rulebook, or colour palette. Not in pushing and performance—but not in pastel softness either. A renovation or book project can be filled with the joy of creating, even if it includes some shit days. A cloudberry bog can dump life on your head by the armful, whether that life is bog gold or wasp nests. The less you cling to one single “right” state of being, hovering over every internal shift or emotional twitch, the more freely joy can flow.
Joy and presence and the delight of being mean that sometimes, it can and will be shit. Not necessarily, not daily, not in any predictable quantity—but it can be, and it’s allowed to be. And sometimes, it’s even funny.
You wrote that you choose to come and go and rush and schedule your calendar and zoom around like hell because right now there are just so many interesting things to learn and new people to meet and work worth throwing yourself into. And that maybe next year, you’ll move to a hermit’s cabin and make a career of watching steam rise from a teacup. Maybe.
To me, that captures all the essentials. To me, that sounds like life. Not slow or fast—but real life.
Next time, I’ll be hosting a tea party for doubt.
Elina xo
Ps. This is the final part of our Slow Living series. In case you missed the earlier letters in our exchange, here they are:
Puritanism sucks. I also can’t stand it when people tell me “how I used to think”, as if they haven’t realized that one of the best things about being human is that you get to change your mind.
I am here. I am resonating. Oh man I loved this one!