Slow Living: A Guide to the Slow Way

Slow living has been photographed so often that it is easy to mistake it for a look. Linen in morning light, a cup of something steaming, an armchair so perfectly staged that no one has ever actually sat in it. The pictures are lovely. They are also beside the point.

Slow living is not an aesthetic. It is a relationship with time. It is the decision, made daily and imperfectly, to do things at the pace they deserve rather than the pace they demand. Some things deserve to be quick. Most of the things you love deserve to be lingered over.

This page is our guide to the whole subject, written the way we make everything else here: carefully, and without hurry. Each section below opens into a longer letter on that topic, if you would like to go deeper.

What slow living actually means

The term gets borrowed by every movement in its neighborhood, so it is worth being precise. Slow living is not the same as doing less, owning less, or moving to the countryside, though it is friendly with all three. It is the practice of matching your pace to what the moment is actually for. A meal is for eating. An evening is for ending the day. A book is for reading, which is to say, for staying a while.

People often arrive here from minimalism and wonder if they are the same thing. They are not, and the distinction matters more than it seems. Minimalism counts your possessions. Slow living asks how you spend your hours. We have written about the difference between slow living and minimalism at proper length, because choosing the wrong one is how people end up with empty apartments and full calendars.

How to begin: with the evening

Nobody can slow a workday. The meetings do not care about your philosophy. But the evening is yours, and it is the natural place to begin, because it is the part of the day that suffers most from being rushed and rewards you fastest for the opposite.

If you work full days and come home with a full head, start there. We have written a practical, unromantic guide to how to start a slow living evening routine when you work full time. It assumes you are tired. It works anyway.

Rituals, kept small

The reliable way to fail at slow living is to attempt it all at once, as a renovation of your entire character. The reliable way to succeed is to keep one small ritual until it keeps you.

A ritual, for our purposes, is any ordinary act done with full attention: the first cup drunk sitting down, the table set properly for one, an hour with a book and the phone in another room. None of these requires a free weekend. We keep a list of slow living rituals you can do in under an hour, which is where we would point anyone starting out.

The home that keeps its own time

A slow home is arranged, not purchased. This is good news for your budget and inconvenient news for anyone hoping to buy their way in. Light from lamps instead of overheads, one corner kept genuinely comfortable, surfaces that hold only what they mean to hold. Most of it costs nothing but the deciding.

For the full room-by-room version, read our letter on how to create a slow living home on a small budget.

Through the seasons

Here is a strange thing: the dark months, which ought to suit slowness perfectly, are when most people abandon it. The light goes, the holidays accelerate everything, and by January the rituals have quietly dissolved. It happens to nearly everyone, and it is fixable once you understand it.

We wrote about why slow living feels harder in autumn and winter, and how to keep the practice lit when the days grow short.

A note from the house

Oh Betty Jaletti exists because of everything above. We make small numbered editions of objects for the slow way of living, pressed once and never again. Our first is a set of four companions for the reading hour: the First Edition, four objects for the reading hour.

But the philosophy comes first, and it is free. Begin with an evening.

— B.