Slow living – tea cups, birdhouses, and why balance is a myth
Everything is relative, even slowness.
My hands, having been deep in horse shit and lily roots, are dry as old leather and tattooed with soil. It’s the time of the year when the garden takes over. I’ve been waking at 4 am, rushing to update clients’ websites and to write for my mentoring emails before the seeds and the wheelbarrow start to yell my name.
It’s fine because I’m not after a slow living. It’s good-busy. A life lived, not turned into a formula.
Every spring I make space for lilies of the valley under an ash tree. This year, I’ve been making more space for myself, too.
Polished isn’t the vibe I’m going for with my manure-stained fingers. I’m not here to scrub myself clean of what’s real.
There’s always something that waits for us—the part of ourselves we’ve tried to outrun, avoid, bargain with, or ignore. It’s not chasing you. Just standing there, quietly, in the space between your fears and dreams.
And me? I have no time for sidestepping. I’m walking straight into it. I’m here for the inevitability of coming back to oneself.
Which is why I want to share this letter with you. It’s from my dear friend Janina. It found me in the thick of the garden, right on time.
It’s about slow living and the way it keeps slipping through our fingers even when we try to hold it. Maybe it’ll speak to you, too. (And if it doesn’t—may the scent of soil still linger on the page.)
Vanhalinna, 20 May 2025
Hi Elina!
First of all, thank you for your letter – it feels inspiring to return to this topic after a few weeks.
What a wonderful insight – that life flows through a person, not the other way around! I can see that so vividly. Like a hyperlapse video of someone standing on a cliff their whole life, from baby to old age, with the seasons and weather changing rapidly around them, the person aging before our eyes, the wind first tousling young hair, then greying strands. (If I were a filmmaker or some kind of video artist, I might actually make this into a project!)
“The ethos of slow living is intriguing. There are about 537 million tea cup pics in social media posts tagged as #slowliving, but what does the term even mean beyond vague phrases like living your passion or clichés like burning candles in the autumn evenings?” you write.
The ethos of slow living really is interesting. I’ve noticed it gaining traction within the wellness niche, especially on Instagram, over the past five-plus years. I suppose I can generalize from my personal experience here; perhaps the rising popularity of slow living is a reaction against a performance-driven lifestyle in a competitive society where individual worth is increasingly measured by one’s contributions to the public (working) world – evidenced by degrees, qualifications, material signs of wealth, a beautiful and capable body, and so on.
There are definitely 537 million steaming tea cups on Instagram. When I peek behind the hashtag #slowliving, I find – in addition to tea cups – yoga videos, breakfast spreads captured in natural light, neat kitchens, a woman petting a cat, smiling couples, a beautifully edited reel of life with a small child, beach holiday clips, someone reading a book, someone walking on a boardwalk, another person reading a book, and three tips on how to be more feminine.
I notice I’m starting to feel a bit cynical. That’s of course because of the platform I chose to explore representations of the slow ethos. On Instagram, which leans heavily on visual aesthetics, slow living is packaged into a visually pleasing form with curated layouts, colour palettes, and hazy contrasts. Pull me out of this swamp, Elina! There’s obviously nothing wrong or bad about any of these individual things I just mentioned. It’s lovely to enjoy breakfast from charming dishes with morning sunlight warming your cheeks. It’s lovely to take a selfie with your partner when the mood strikes. It’s truly precious to capture moments of toddler life on video – and downright admirable if you can edit those clips into a seamless whole.
But what is this small voice inside me that starts to get irritated? Am I annoyed because when I look at slow living on Insta, it feels like I’m watching ads for it? Like someone is trying to sell me slow living. Like someone is also trying to convince me that my faster life is not nearly as desirable as this slow life filled with muesli bowls and smiles and beach vacations.
And you say it perfectly: “There’s a difference between living in a way that feels good, authentic, and right for yourself and sticking better-worse labels on slow and fast.”
Maybe there’s no point in trying to find a general definition of slow living in the depths of Instagram – that’s probably the last place to look. On a platform like that, warped by algorithms, showcasing content and drawing an audience resembles – quite literally – marketing. And whatever slow living may be, I don’t think it pairs well with selling, do you?
“Life’s rhythmicity varies: within a single day, there’s room for faster and slower tempo. Life stages and changes affect rhythmicity,” you write.
You know, it’s taken me what feels like a small eternity to grasp this rhythm of life. I remember times when I longed for balance. Or longed is putting it mildly – it was more like flailing, almost pulling my hair out in desperation for balance. I’ve since come to understand that balance in life is an illusion – at least if we understand it as constancy. Balance as rhythm, as you write, is the natural state of things. Days, weeks, months – all the human-made time frames – can contain all sorts of tempos and mental states, from one extreme to the other, and that’s just totally normal.
“Nature is often linked to the pathos of slow living, which I find comical. Especially in the northern latitudes where I live, the growing season is overwhelmingly intense. Nothing could be further from slow than Nordic summertime nature,” you write.
I was thinking about this when, earlier in spring, I was cleaning birdhouses with my kid – in good time, or so I thought, yet it was still a rush, even though it was only early March. The tits were already singing piercingly and clearly scoping out nest boxes for their summer broods. Great tits watched our activities with what seemed like interest – and maybe a bit of worry. How long can opening that hatch possibly take? Oh, you need a screwdriver now? And hey, where are you even taking that box? Tiit!
I felt slow and clumsy, fumbling with different nest boxes across the yard and into the woods. In my (perhaps overly idyllic) mental images, slow living in nature is precisely the kind of peaceful wandering along boardwalks on a quiet bog, where nothing is in sight but emptiness – not a soul, not a sign of life.
But precisely. As I fumble slowly with our birdhouses (and nearly get a yellow-necked mouse dumped on my face from one of them, poor thing!), I realize that the only slow thing in nature is me (or, if I’m out on the bog, I also think of peat as being slow). It’s oddly ironic that slowness gets associated with nature, which pulses and spins and renews itself constantly at such an intense pace. And so do we humans – we just view our long lives from too close a perspective to see clearly how we, too, pulse and spiral and regenerate. From the perspective of a tree in a protected forest or an entire bog ecosystem, even our human lifespan is short and frantic.
I no longer strive for a slow life. And I might even say I don’t strive for a balanced life either. I don’t really strive for life in any particular way. It’s about rhythm, just like you wrote. Right now, the rhythm in the beautiful song of my life is a very fast-paced one. Presto prestissimo – extremely fast. Or perhaps more like allegro vivace – fast and lively. I’m interested in so many things at once. So many things are pulling me in, and rather than lingering for long moments watching steam curl up from a tea cup into the cool room air, I’d rather study, participate, and throw myself into life.
I know that we all have the same amount of time in our days. I know how long a week is. I also know that time is relative, and that the more tightly one schedules their calendar, the faster time seems to pass. Still, I choose to do this now. To come and go and dash and rush like hell, because we only live once − or how would I know?
Right now, I want to learn EVERYTHING about climate change and forest conservation. Right now, I want to change careers and see what working life might still have in store for me (only wonderful things, I’m sure!). Right now, I want to meet the marvellous and the quirky and the incredibly unique people I will encounter in all these wants of mine.
And next year, I might want something completely different. Maybe to move back to that hermit cabin in the middle of the woods like I’ve often dreamed of (and still kind of do), maybe to move abroad and shed my skin completely, maybe to just stare at the steam rising from my 538-millionth cup of tea.
But right now, I choose to say yes.
What do you think about all this? Write again, write soon!
I can’t wait to hear from you!
♡ Janina
I’ll be back soon with more words, dirt under my nails, and maybe a few potatoes.
Until then—listen for the birds. They remember what you’re made of.
Elina xo
Ps. If you didn’t catch the last part of our exchange, it’s waiting for you here.