Rewild & Slow
Day 14: Melanie Fontaine
When Eleanor asked me if I wanted to contribute to Rewild & Slow my first instinct was to decline. I loved the sound of her project and what it stood for, but I wasn’t sure if someone like me had anything worthwhile to contribute. Someone like me – that means someone who lives in an apartment in the city who hears the sound of traffic as she is typing these words. Someone who commutes to an even bigger city almost daily to work long hours in a modern office building. Someone, in short, whose life greatly differs from the idealized image of slow living online. How would anyone think I was equipped to talk about slow living?
But the truth is that slow living isn’t an aesthetic. Slow living doesn’t require you to wear linen dresses, live in an old cottage and never see a conventional supermarket from the inside again.
You don’t need to be able to walk through wild landscapes for hours every day or be self-employed in a creative profession to practice slow living. And you certainly don’t need to live in the countryside.
I believe that slow living isn’t about external factors. For me, slow living is an approach towards life. It’s an internal attitude that pushes you to make conscious decisions and to live life with intention. It‘s refusing to do things just because “that’s how it’s supposed to be done”. It’s having the courage to walk your own path in life, even if the people closest to you don’t quite get where you are coming from. It’s deciding to stop looking to sources outside of yourself to make your choices and instead listening to that quiet voice of wisdom that’s already deep inside of you.
You can fulfil all the visual tropes of #slowlivingforlife and still live a life where your choices are not actually dictated by the values of your authentic self, where you are not guided by intention. And conversely, you can work in a high-pressure environment and not have a single candle and chunky knit blanket in your home and still wake up every morning knowing that slow living isn’t just your lifestyle, but simply your life. Of course, slow living will look different for extroverted city dwellers than for introverted countryside residents, but there is no right or wrong way to do it, at least not by any objective standard. What is right for one person will be wrong for another and vice versa.
So what can you do if you live in a city, but find yourself desperately craving to slow down your life? Well, examine the different parts that make up your life and start to eliminate the things that have come into your life without intention. And then slowly start to add in the things that actually align with your authentic self. It’s a process. It takes time. But maybe that’s what puts the slow in living. It’s entirely possible to do slow living while you are living in a city – and you can start at any moment.