Maybe twenty years ago, I was a great sucker for the "friction-maxxing" movement: Wendell Berry, The Quotidian Mysteries, Marilynne Robinson and Housekeeping, Nicholson Baker and Box of Matches -- I was well on my way to becoming an adventure-less Alexander Supertramp, dwelling in thrift stores and vegetable gardens.
While these things are all well and good, making and breaking bread and living in community, and slow-walking between booths at farmers markets do provide the warm fuzzies, the flip side is that life really is slow. The people I know from that part of my life are still pretty much where they were, doing the same things.
And now, perhaps because I've been reading too many cyberpunk books where the heroes deeply embrace the integration of the virtual in their lives, I have to say that I find the slow life uninteresting.
Especially as I think a little more about how it will feel to be old and looking back, I doubt that the thing I will wish I had done more was admiring the sunrise.
Maybe twenty years ago, I was a great sucker for the "friction-maxxing" movement: Wendell Berry, The Quotidian Mysteries, Marilynne Robinson and Housekeeping, Nicholson Baker and Box of Matches -- I was well on my way to becoming an adventure-less Alexander Supertramp, dwelling in thrift stores and vegetable gardens.
While these things are all well and good, making and breaking bread and living in community, and slow-walking between booths at farmers markets do provide the warm fuzzies, the flip side is that life really is slow. The people I know from that part of my life are still pretty much where they were, doing the same things.
And now, perhaps because I've been reading too many cyberpunk books where the heroes deeply embrace the integration of the virtual in their lives, I have to say that I find the slow life uninteresting.
Especially as I think a little more about how it will feel to be old and looking back, I doubt that the thing I will wish I had done more was admiring the sunrise.