Slowing Down Time

Starving for calm even as we Go Go Go.

Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid” (1658-59)

We live in the age of distraction and it’s driving some of us to madness.

It’s ironic too given how technology promised to simplify our lives.

We’re starving for calm even as we Go Go Go.

I don’t know how others slow down time, but for me the solution means unplugging, making time to do less, and embracing play.

Running a winding path in the woods or just wandering there, chatting aimlessly with my closest people, reading great fiction, listening to full albums.

Attending to one thing wholly and with care like cooking up breakfast for my kids in the quiet just before dawn…

I thought about this after reading the last paragraphs of a review of the Vermeer exhibit at the Rijksmuseum.

128 words, by Jason Farago and published in the Times, that capture the world we are starving for and can begin to carve out amid the tumult.

Here it is,

Be quiet and look at the girl with pursed lips, reading a letter aloud in the half-light. The clouded, motionless view of Delft. The maid directing all her attention to the milk that pours from a humble earthenware jug. Nothing important is happening, and yet that nothing is everything now.

Vermeer has become one of our last defibrillators of absorption and awareness. He matters now precisely for his vindication that we have not wholly decayed into data receptors; that we are still human, and if only we find the right master we can slow down time. What is a masterpiece, in 2023? A thing that returns to you — vitally, commandingly, after this clamorous world of news and notifications seemed to have wiped them out — your powers of concentration.