I’m living like I’m running late for something, even when there’s nowhere urgent I need to be. There’s this nagging pressure to move faster that I can’t seem to turn off. Every time I start something new, I want results immediately. When I don’t see them, I panic and assume I’m doing something wrong.
But lately I’ve been wondering if the rushing is the problem. What if the most radical thing I could do is just slow down? It sounds almost rebellious! Our whole culture is built around speed. But there’s something real in learning to resist that urge to hurry everything along.
Oliver Burkeman nails this in “Four Thousand Weeks”:
“In a world geared for hurry, the capacity to resist the urge to hurry – to allow things to take the time they take – is a way to gain purchase on the world, to do the work that counts, and to derive satisfaction from the doing itself, instead of deferring all your fulfilment to the future.”
That line wrecked me a little. I’ve spent so much time deferring satisfaction to some imaginary future version of my life that I forgot to pay attention to the work in front of me.
This gets really interesting when you think about finding your own voice in anything you do. Burkeman tells a story from photographer Arno Minkkinen that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:
“The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatises this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about Helsinki’s main bus station. There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one – and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops. Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction – perhaps you start working on platinum prints of nudes – and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knock-offs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialise. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognised as being truly your own.
What’s the solution? ‘It’s simple,’ Minkkinen says. ‘Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.’ A little further out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage – the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills and accumulating experience.”
I’ve jumped off so many buses. Picked up hobbies, interests, projects, gave them a month or two, got frustrated that I wasn’t producing anything original, and bailed. Started over. Picked a new direction. Got frustrated again. The whole time thinking the problem was my choice of bus, when really the problem was that I never rode one long enough to reach the part where the routes diverge.