Slowly, slowly…

Lenta lenta; leve leve; sigà sigà; shway, shway – from Italy to Arabia, Portugal to Greece, around the world you can find an array of lovable language for the same key thought: live life slowly slowly.

In an age increasingly overrun by ever-faster AI acceleration, where the blind pursuit of speed can lead to work slop, withered brains and worse, it’s a reminder to slow down, take your time, cherish quality over quantity. This is neither laidback nor lazy, it is strong long-term thinking that applies to pretty much every critical aspect of our humanity, including writing. According to Virgina Woolf in her essay The Art of Fiction, ‘Flaubert spent a month seeking a phrase to describe a cabbage’. And the story goes that James Joyce, when asked whether he had had a good day writing, replied: ‘Yes. I had the words of the sentence yesterday and I got the order write today’! If writers of this calibre took their time, so should we.

So here’s to slow excellence. Swerve the slop. Take it slowly slowly.