A Literary Prescription for

Slow Living

For choosing the speed of your own days.

Slow living is not about doing less, exactly. It is about pace: the fact that most of us have never once chosen the speed at which our days run, and have simply accepted whatever speed the work, the phone and everybody else’s expectations set for us. It shows up as eating standing at the counter, arriving everywhere slightly late and slightly braced, reading four pages before falling asleep, and the peculiar experience of a whole season passing without your having noticed the weather. This is distinct from simplicity, which is about how much you own, and from quiet, which is about noise, and there are separate prescriptions here for both. These books, poems and quotes are about the speed itself: where the hurry came from, what it costs, and how people have gone about deliberately slowing a life down without moving to a farmhouse.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Three of these argue the case and give you something to do about it, including one for people who cannot simply leave their job and keep bees. The rest are books that demonstrate rather than argue: a Finnish island, a village in Clare, a garden in Pomerania and a French builder who cannot be rushed by anybody.

In Praise of Slow

Carl Honoré · 2004

The book that named the movement, written by a journalist who caught himself considering a book of one-minute bedtime stories so he could get his son to sleep faster. Honoré travels through slow food, slow cities, slow medicine and slow sex, and the argument that holds it together is not that slower is always better but that we have lost the ability to choose the speed at all. Twenty years old and, if anything, more accurate now.

This Is Happiness

Niall Williams · 2019

Faha, a village in County Clare, in the spring the electricity arrives and the rain stops for the first time in living memory. Williams writes long, unhurried sentences that behave like the place he is describing, and the novel is quietly about what the village is about to lose along with the darkness. Read it slowly. It punishes skimming and rewards the other thing entirely.

Rest

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang · 2016

Pang went through the working habits of unusually productive people — Darwin, Dickens, Poincaré, a great many scientists — and found that almost none of them worked more than about four or five focused hours a day. The rest of the time they walked, napped, gardened and did nothing much on purpose. His case is that rest is not the absence of work but part of it, and he has the evidence.

The Summer Book

Tove Jansson · 1972

A grandmother and a six-year-old on a small island in the Gulf of Finland, across one summer, in very short chapters. Almost nothing happens: they argue, they build things, they look at moss. Jansson understood that a life lived at the pace of weather and tides produces a different quality of attention, and this is the book people press on each other when they want to explain what they mean by slowing down.

Slow Productivity

Cal Newport · 2024

For anybody who cannot simply leave their job and keep bees. Newport’s three principles are do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality, and he draws them from how writers, scientists and craftspeople actually operated before the invention of the inbox. The most useful book here if the pace you want to change is the one you are paid to keep.

A Year in Provence

Peter Mayle · 1989

Mayle buys a farmhouse in the Lubéron and spends a year discovering that nothing in rural France can be hurried, least of all a builder. It is funny, it is occasionally smug, and it sold six million copies because it described something people badly wanted: a place where lunch takes two hours because lunch takes two hours, and nobody considers that a problem to be solved.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery · 2006

A Paris concierge who hides her intelligence behind a television, and a twelve-year-old upstairs who has decided life is not worth the trouble. What connects them is an eye for the moments Barbery calls always within reach: rain on a windowpane, a phrase of Mozart, a camellia on moss. It belongs here because those moments are only available at one speed, and it is not the usual one.

Poems about slowing down

Three men who stopped and looked

A tramp who noticed that the people with houses never stood still, a train that halted by accident at an empty platform in June 1914, and a novelist working out what he would like said about him afterwards.

from “Leisure”

W.H. Davies, 1911

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
…
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Davies spent years as a tramp in America and Britain and lost a leg jumping a freight train, so this is not the complaint of a man with too much leisure. It is the observation of somebody who had watched people with houses and salaries and noticed they were the ones who never stopped. The comparison with sheep and cows is the joke and also the point.

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“Adlestrop”

Edward Thomas, 1917

Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name.
…
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

An express train stops by accident at an empty platform in June 1914 and nothing whatever happens for one minute. Thomas wrote it down two years later in a notebook while training for the Western Front, where he was killed. What the poem records is what becomes available when the forward motion stops: first one blackbird, then, widening, two entire counties of them.

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from “Afterwards”

Thomas Hardy, 1917

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
“He was a man who used to notice such things”?
…
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, “He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could not do much for them; and now he is gone.”

Hardy imagines his own death and asks what he would like said, and the answer is not that he was successful or even kind. It is that he was a man who used to notice such things. The hedgehog crossing the lawn is the detail that gives it away: you only know a hedgehog crosses your lawn at night if you have been slow enough, often enough, to be standing there.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about slow living to keep

Short lines for the morning you catch yourself hurrying for no reason at all.

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?

Henry David Thoreau

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In an age of speed, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention.

Pico Iyer

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Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone.

Lin Yutang

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Hurry is not of the Devil; hurry is the Devil.

Carl Jung

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The pace of a day is the one thing almost nobody thinks to choose. We choose the house, the work, the person, and then let the speed be decided for us by whoever is shouting loudest.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Setting your own pace

A few short practices for the beginning and end of a day, which is usually where the speed gets decided.

Morning Yoga Nidra

Premium meditation · Georgia Clare

A slow, restorative practice for beginning the day at a pace you have chosen rather than one you have inherited.

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Gratitude for Small Comforts

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A meditation for noticing the small, ordinary comforts already around you — the warm cup, the soft light, the quiet moment.

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Why One Small Thing Can Change Your Day

A short talk by Georgia Clare

A short talk on how one small, deliberate thing can quietly change the shape of a whole day.

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The Inner Peace Toolkit

Digital Self-Care Toolkit · Georgia Clare

2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down.

Explore the Toolkit →

Questions people ask

Reading for Slow Living

Where should I start?

Start with In Praise of Slow by Carl Honoré, which named the whole idea and is still the best introduction. If you cannot change your circumstances but could change how you work, read Slow Productivity by Cal Newport instead. And if you would rather be shown than told, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson is a grandmother and a child on an island where almost nothing happens.

Is slow living just for people who can afford it?

A fair objection, and the honest answer is that some versions of it are: the farmhouse in Provence is not available to most people. But the core of it is about pace rather than property. Doing fewer things at once, refusing to eat standing up, walking somewhere you would normally drive, protecting one unscheduled hour — none of that requires money, though it does require saying no to somebody.

Which quotes about slow living are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?” (Henry David Thoreau), “Hurry is not of the Devil; hurry is the Devil” (Carl Jung) and Lin Yutang on the noble art of leaving things undone. You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

How is this different from simplicity or quiet?

Slow living is about pace, simplicity is about how much you own, and quiet is about noise. They travel together and they are not the same problem. You can own very little and still live at a sprint, and you can have a silent house and no time in it. There are separate prescriptions here for simplicity, quiet, stillness and seasonal living if the difficulty is one of those rather than speed.

Slow Living

Prescribed reading

Three men who stopped and looked

Quotes about slow living to keep

Setting your own pace

Reading for Slow Living

Where should I start?

Is slow living just for people who can afford it?

Which quotes about slow living are worth keeping?

How is this different from simplicity or quiet?

More prescriptions await.