For Petra

While she sits contemplating movement, she is in vintage: Slow describes evolution and the way the universe works. Life on earth was set in motion only billions of years after earth’s existence. Slow was part of the formula that led the universe to have unfolded this way: Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, bit by bit and every second that preceded the next, still a part to add to the whole. It needed to take its time and continues to teach us how to. We see this in how everything moves, through the tides and the changing of seasons. But if there is anything unfashionable, it is without a doubt, this. This that brought us here in the first place.

Slow is the perfect suit for us to have discovered fire and how it makes meat taste better after waiting. Slow is the coat that taught men that together they can build families –before they can build civilizations. Slow is the robe that made the wheel, and also the one that built machinery. Slow is how we find ourselves here, where we have abandoned it to prefer undressing quickly, for strangers. Slow is the way love makes and moves in us, with us, so we can move in sync with an other and one another. From a brutish, animalistic dependence, it is in this rhythm we learned the nuances of what people can mean to us: mother, sister, friend, lover, or enemy.

The commonplace notion is that “each day in which we wear down slowly, we run out of time”. But each day in which we choose to wear slowly, we in fact take in our hands so that time moves with us and not the other way around. Slow is also perceived as worn only by those who are weak but truly, slow is an armor for the brave. These days, slow is luxurious, like hope, it has become expensive and ill-fitting –either too big or too small. It is something that nobody wears anymore. Slow, at its best, has been referred to as “perfect timing”, sometimes serendipity, but this is how it has always been only garish and perpetually out of fashion.