Slow life.

I’ve long been aware that not only is the future not evenly distributed, but time isn’t experienced the same way by all, despite our capability to measure and keep time with precisions of billionths of a second. Stepping into different cultures, as close as the back roads of Washington, we step into different times where animals graze unhurried and somehow that slows down your footsteps as well. I grew up in 1970s China, which is akin to 1930s America. Arriving in the US on a Boeing 747 in the early 90s is stepping out of a real time machine, and not only is it a different time here, it also moves faster.

We don’t question time, and aside from sci-fi provocations we assume its absolute uniformity. Tick, tock.  But what really is time passing, and how do we know it? Before there were clocks, it was measured with movement and change: sun and shadow, movement of water and sand, burning of incense. In her book Yosemite in Time, writer Rebecca Solnit documented the alpine trees that grew only millimeters in a century, looking exactly the same as in pictures taken in the dawn of photography, and called them “tree clocks” that kept time on a wholly different scale. Movement and change is based in perspective and therefore time also; Solnit relayed that in some cultures, people say that time is different in the middle of a big river and along its shores. One can hardly argue that: if you want to experience time differently, just go into the water in the middle of a river, or go nearer its edge.

Not that we should be like the trees or that to stand by the river is better in any way. Change is necessary and natural, and one doesn’t live a longer or richer life by being still. But I, like many designers, have come to desire not only a simpler life but also a slower one. It’s easy to slow down time. Make rather than buy. Mend rather than throw away. Walk on earth rather than jog on the treadmill. Turn off moving pictures in the background. And most importantly, do one thing at a time.

To design is to change so we bring change. What we bring into the world is influenced by our perception of time and the speed with which we wish to move through it, and we have the Superman power to move a small part of the world at a different speed than the rest. Move deliberately and at your own pace.