Yet Untitled 178 - Slow as Flow

Renegotiating my relationship with Slowness after years of being oppressed by it

Dearest Yet Untitler,

Let me tell you about the past forty years:
I’ve been wanting to share this for awhile here.
Turns out,
In these years: 
I have held speed dear. 
The way of the till-recent so-far me
Was the way of the roaring Ferrari. 
It was the quickness of the squirrel
As it scurried up a tree.
I thumbs-upped darting dolphins
I yawned at lumbering whales,
I wanted to be a speedboat…
Till I realised that I’d rather sail!

Let me tell you about the last one year: 
At some point I was filled with fear!
The gas started to run out. 
Filling me with every sort of doubt. 
I thought:
“Now’s the time to go faster.
How would I finish, already on fumes?”
I imagined I was flirting with disaster,
Dreaming dreams of death and tombs.

This last year…
I imposed a new slowness,
Mostly to take stock.
Perhaps to run fast again,
Pull up my sagging socks. 
But I was loathing,
Secretly loathing - 
How slowly I passed the trees. 
Inside me a wind was blowing
How I hated just drifting along on the breeze.

It was then that I heard the buzzing of the bees. 

My slowness allowed me 
To see the studied unhurriedness
Of the little bee.
A slow drone between flower to flower
A movement built on the awesome power 
Of something invisible. 

The beat of those wings... 
Tiny, fragile, little things. 

The bee's dance:
Things like this changed my stance
I’m in a different place.
Yes, there’s a goal, but there is no race,  
The bee and I both chose 'slow'.
Watching her,
This Runner 
Learned to Flow.

There’s no song and singer more appropriate👆🏼to provide a soundtrack to this installment, dearest YUer.

I’ll keep things brief.

I have a strained relationship with ‘slow’.

An anecdote explains some part of it:

It was in Math class - perhaps it was grade 7 or 8 - I was asked to solve a problem on the board. It was one of those frozen-in-time scenarios when the only movement I perceived were the dust mites moving, bee-like, in the streams of sunlight coming in through the window.

The solution to the math problem was eluding me. Everyone was watching me. The front-benchers were likely pitying me. Then the teacher said it, the single syllable leaving his lips like a black bubble that floated to me and popped right below my nose.

“Slow,” he pronounced. It was a judgment. An assessment. It became a label - dipped in acid and cut with shame.

---

Another anecdote

A more recent one.

I trained for the 10K run at the Tata Mumbai Marathon for the greater part of January. ChatGPT was my coach 🤖. After studying my patterns and bio-numbers for a bit - it advised me to run slow. Real slow.

With every run, I’d give ChatGPT my numbers - the stats recorded by my smartwatch, my sleep score and whatever else I thought would be useful. Quite consistently, ChatGPT kept telling me to slow down and applauded me when I did it, as if I had won a race!

I found it all very interesting.

I hadn’t run a 10K for two years. I don’t know why. Mostly, I had replaced running - something which has remained of paramount importance to me since my 20s - with other activities. I think, somehow, I was convinced that I was fighting a losing battle with myself that was laid bare by the act of running - that I was getting slower with every passing year and there was nothing I could do about it.

Running had become the site of this conflict inside me, and lately, this fight had become stressful. Then came ChatGPT, turning the whole thing on its head.

As a result, not only did I end up enjoying each day of my training, I also deeply enjoyed the marathon event. I realised that it has been about 4 years or more since I ran ten kilometers continuously without stopping. I had taken to running hard in bursts, then walking a bit to bring my heart rate down before running again. It had become something oppressive, in which I was simply refusing to give in to ‘slow’.

1:45:00. Slow as it goes. Azad Maidan, Mumbai, c. 2026

I think I broke that cycle of shame with my ChatGPT-coached run. This 10K was likely my most controlled, most honest and most enjoyable one. I proudly say it was was really slow, but I ran true to myself and honestly challenged my limitations without trying to create the illusion of speed just because I was afraid of its absence.

The run gave me many things. I felt alive and awake enough after it to see the morning baptize Mumbai, giving its grime a gilded veneer.

Near VT station, Mumbai, c. 2026

Seems that I’m not the only one who’s writing about the merits of slowness. Here’s my friend and Substacker Sana Ally talking about similar themes with her usual poignance.

On mountains, magic and the mundane.

I also realised that I’ve been on this exploration of my relationship with slowness for longer than I think:

This lesson has come to me late. But I don’t mind. I’ve written about my respect for late-blooming and late-bloomers extensively:

I think I’ll stop here. But before I go:

What’s sort of feeling does ‘slowness’ evoke for you? With what meaning do you regard it?

Is that a good question? I hope so. I’m too tired from my slow run to think more. Must sleep. But tell me. I. Want. To. Know.

Thank you, always, for listening.

Lots of love

V