Learning to Slow Down, Again
I started something new this year: Introduction to History of Art and Design at university. I walked into that first lecture expecting to talk about paintings and movements and centuries. Instead, the lecturer opened with something I didn't expect at all.
She told us we needed to shift our habits — from scrolling to slow reading.
I sat there and felt it land somewhere quite specific. Because she was right, and because it is genuinely hard.
I learned to read and study in the 1970s. Long stretches of quiet were just... how learning happened. You sat with a book, or a lecture, or your own thoughts, for as long as it took. Nobody was interrupting that with a notification. Nobody was training your attention to expect something new every few seconds. It wasn't a skill I had to build — it was just the shape of the world I learned in.
So going back into study now, decades later, in a world that has quietly retrained all of us to skim, flick, and scroll — I'm noticing how much effort slow reading actually takes. It doesn't come naturally anymore. I have to choose it, on purpose, every time I sit down with a text.
And once I noticed that, I started noticing it everywhere else too.
I've started eating more slowly — actually tasting the food instead of finishing it while doing three other things. I've let myself have the occasional stretch of proper daydreaming, staring out a window with nowhere particular for my thoughts to go, which used to feel like "doing nothing" and now feels more like doing something quite important. Slow reading, slow eating, slow noticing. It's turning into a whole philosophy, not just a study habit.
It's not lost on me that this is exactly what I've been trying to hand to children through Greta and her books all along — the idea that paying attention to one small thing, for longer than feels comfortable at first, is where the good stuff actually lives. Apparently I needed a university lecture to make me properly practise what I've been preaching.
If you've ever caught yourself mid-scroll and thought, I used to be able to sit still with a book for an hour — you're not imagining it, and you're not alone. It really is a habit we've lost, and like any habit, it can be rebuilt. Slowly.