Hello, it’s been a while. Before you click/tap your way out of this email, let me tell you that I get it. You can roll your eyes and skip today’s letter, I won’t resent you. Until the holiday, I hadn’t been on vacation in a long time and would feel a glimmer of jealousy at every single holiday photo on social media. When I say I hadn’t been on holiday in a long time, I mean it. My last holiday was December 2018, my last beach holiday long before that. In between, countless dark days, so excuse me while I am feeling joyous about my recent getaway and the breakthrough that came with it.
To give you some context, I stayed with friends in a remote fishing village in Southern Italy. I’d wake up quite early, take a stroll along the shore, return home for breakfast, make lunch, pack lunch, walk to the beach, move the sun chair out of the sun and into the shadow and hit pause. I did not read much, I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon and my ears attuned to the many sounds of seaside life. You’d even think the holiday turned me into one of those nature-loving people. I inhaled the salty air with the intensity of a truffle-hunting dog and thanked my lucky stars for the much needed opportunity to be somewhere else, somewhere nice, under the sun. I relaxed. I paused. I did not think. The unusual lack of thoughts in my head felt blissful, also liberating. I smiled a lot.
With the holiday came the realisation that slow is good. Slow allows us to sharpen our senses, to turn inward and understand both what we want and what we don’t need. But slow often comes with privilege. Because the world tells us we need more, bigger, shinier, faster, but all we really need is less and a more imaginative collective future. Our times call desperately for a shift in how we live and envision our realities and it can all start with slowing down, noticing all we already have, while setting to do the work which awaits us. Suddenly, to want a smaller, slower life is a possibility, one that I had never contemplated before.
xx shirin
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