If Everything Could Go Slow

Drip, drip, drip.

I am watching the rain fall from an open sky, steady and unhurried, the way rain falls when it has nowhere else to be. It returned to Hualien this weekend after warm and sunny weeks that had almost made me forget what this feels like — this particular comfort of grey skies and wet streets, of a world that slows itself down without being asked.

It is falling now onto something slow inside me too. Landing there softly, like permission.

I woke up this morning with no intention of yoga. Some mornings arrive already knowing what they need to be, and this one arrived quiet and kitchen-scented, already pulling me toward something warmer and more communal than a mat and a meditation. We share this house in Hualien with six other families — plus our host — and today was a feast day. My contribution: pancakes. Seventy-two of them, as it would turn out.

I plugged in my earphones, disappeared into the audiobook I have been living inside for the past few days, and entered a kind of trance I have no better word for than flow. For two hours I moved through the kitchen like something unhurried and certain — measuring five equal batches of batter, blending each until smooth, then standing at the warm stove with a single pancake pan simmering over the gas burner.

There was a rhythm to it that felt almost meditative. A spoon of oil, a pour of batter, a slow tilt of the pan until the edges caught and filled. A turn. A mark on a piece of paper to keep count. A flip. A finish. A new pancake added to the growing pile, warm and golden and smelling of something simple and good. Then again. And again. And again.

At 9:15 the kitchen held seventy-two pancakes, stacked in golden piles, scenting the whole house with something that made children appear from nowhere, wide-eyed and already reaching. We ate together — our families, our temporary village — chatting and passing plates and sharing the particular sweetness of a slow Saturday morning made sweeter by something homemade.

This, I thought, is also a kind of practice.

Then Tommy and I slipped out for our usual morning coffee date, just the two of us, sheltering under a pink umbrella while the rain kept its steady rhythm on the pavement around us. Two people under a small roof. Two white paper cups. The red lines of the little road in front of us shimmering with wet, and the rain falling its rhythmic song, and nothing particular required of either of us.

I sat and stared — mesmerised, a little lost — at the rain and the road and the particular quality of stillness that exists between two people who know each other well enough to simply be quiet together. And then, the way it sometimes happens in moments of genuine slowness, I was no longer entirely there.

I was somewhere else.

Vipassana. October last year. Warm autumn in Denmark, the landscape all green and yellow and light brown, the trees beginning their annual letting go. Myself, walking slowly over cliffs for hours, one deliberate step at a time, the sound of my own breathing the loudest thing I could hear. Days and days of silence, of turning inward so completely that the boundary between inner and outer world became soft and permeable. Everything felt both achingly close and very far away — emotions rising and passing like weather, thoughts arriving and dissolving, the whole inventory of a life laid quietly out before me with nowhere to hide from any of it.

That was slowness in its purest form. The kind that does not arrive easily or comfortably, the kind you have to deliberately choose and then sit inside without flinching.

And yet this morning, under a pink umbrella, watching rain drip from its edges onto a small wet road in Taiwan — something of that same quality was here. Smaller, softer, unearned. But present. The same stillness wearing different clothes.

This is the rhythm I fall back into, over and over, whenever life loosens its grip enough to let me. It is always there — I know this now — but I keep forgetting and then remembering again, which is perhaps simply the nature of it. You cannot hold stillness. You can only return to it, gratefully, each time the noise quietens enough to hear it calling.

I love this rhythm the way you love something ancient and familiar — like a place you have never been to in this lifetime but recognise completely the moment you arrive. Like a past-life memory. Like the smell of rain on warm pavement, which is both completely new every time and as old as the earth itself.

I love slowness. And yet I keep rushing.

The traveling life is often the opposite of what my soul most deeply craves — fast and logistical and constantly new, always another country to navigate, another kitchen to learn, another rhythm of ordinary life to decode from scratch. There is beauty in that, real beauty, but there is also a particular kind of exhaustion that accumulates in the body of a person who moves too often. And what I have learned, slowly and through much resistance, is that the rushing makes the stillness more visible. You notice the slow moments more sharply when you know how quickly they pass. The contrast is the teacher.

In a few days, the rushing will return. New places. New sounds and smells and routines to discover and dismantle. The particular aliveness of moving through the world with open hands. I love that too, I do — but right now, today, I am not ready to let go of this.

I don’t have a grand conclusion for this. No lesson wrapped and tied.

I just wanted to press this day between these pages before it slips away — the rain and the pancakes and the pink umbrella, Tommy beside me with his white paper cup, the red lines of a wet road in Hualien on a slow Saturday in April.

The feeling in my bones of something settling, something that has no name but that I have learned, over years of inner work and many countries and one long October of silence, to recognise as home.

Not a place. Never just a place.

A rhythm. A quality of attention. A way of being inside time that asks nothing of you except to stay, just a little longer, exactly where you are.

This is what I wanted to remember.

This, and the smell of seventy-two warm pancakes on a rainy morning, and the particular grace of a day that asked nothing more of me than to be slow.