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People ask me what is slow living like they expect a tidy definition, and I never quite have one ready. I understand the pull toward a clean answer. I looked for one too, back when I first heard the phrase and realized I was already living some version of it without knowing there was a name. But the honest answer is that slow living isn’t a checklist or an aesthetic. It’s a way of deciding what your days are actually for.
I live in a green farmhouse in Long Grove, Illinois, with my partner Danny, our son Lochlan, our dog Dewey, and a tortoiseshell cat named Delilah who runs the place. I make a lot of what we eat from scratch. I grow what I can. And I came to all of it slowly, through a season of grief I wouldn’t wish on anyone. So when I try to explain what slow living means, I’m not describing a trend I picked up. I’m describing the life that grief and rest and a lot of paying attention handed me.
What slow living actually means
At its simplest, slow living means doing fewer things and giving them more of yourself. That’s it. It grew out of the slow food movement in Italy in the 1980s, which pushed back on fast food and everything it stood for, and it has branched out since into slow travel, slow parenting, slow fashion, all of it. But you don’t need the history to feel what it’s asking of you.
It’s asking you to stop measuring a good day by how much you got done. For most of my twenties I thought a full calendar meant a full life. We lived in the city then, and I loved parts of it, but there was always somewhere to be and always a next thing. Slow living is the opposite of that instinct. It’s choosing depth over volume. It’s cooking the meal instead of grabbing something on the way. It’s letting an afternoon be quiet instead of filling it.
What it is not is a competition to see who can can the most tomatoes or bake the prettiest loaf. That version, the one that shows up polished and perfect online, misses the whole point. Slow living isn’t about performing a simple life. It’s about actually having one.
How I ended up here
I didn’t choose this on purpose. Grief chose it for me first, and I followed.
When you lose someone, the noise of a busy life stops making sense. The workout classes and the dinners out and the constant motion, none of it held any weight anymore. What held weight was small and close. A warm kitchen. Bread rising on the counter. The kind of quiet where you can actually hear your own thinking again. I started reaching for those things because they were the only things that felt real, and slowly they became the shape of my days.
Then Danny and I found the farmhouse, and then Lochlan arrived, and the slower life I’d stumbled into became the life I wanted to build on purpose. I also live with an autoimmune disease, which means rest for me isn’t a luxury or a reward I earn after the work is done. It’s medicine. My body forces the slowness even on days my mind wants to push. Learning to stop treating rest like failure was one of the hardest and most freeing parts of all of this.
What slow living looks like day to day
People imagine slow living is all long golden mornings, and some of them are lovely. But most of it is ordinary and a little repetitive, and that’s the good part.
Mornings start before Lochlan wakes, if I can manage it. Coffee, the dog let out into the wet grass, a few minutes where nothing is asked of me yet. Then it’s a normal day with a baby, which is to say it’s not slow at all in the calm sense. Slow living with a little one doesn’t mean silence. It means I’m not trying to do six other things while I’m with him. When I’m making his food, I’m making his food. When we’re on the floor together, my phone is in the other room.
In the kitchen I make what I have time and energy for, and I’ve let go of the guilt around the rest. Some weeks that’s sourdough and bone broth and a garden’s worth of tomatoes turned into sauce. Other weeks, on the low-energy days, it’s a pot of soup and toast, and that counts too. Danny and I split things by whoever has more in the tank that day. Dewey follows me from room to room. Delilah judges us all from the windowsill.
The garden is where a lot of this lives for me. I’m still learning it, still figuring out what grows well here in the Midwest and what just breaks my heart every year. But there’s something about putting your hands in the dirt and waiting months for one good tomato that rewires how you think about time. You can’t rush a garden. It taught me that before I fully understood I was learning it.
Slow living isn’t about having less to do
Here’s the thing nobody tells you. A slow life can be a lot of work. Making things from scratch takes time. A garden takes time. Rest, real rest, takes a kind of discipline I didn’t have a few years ago. Slow living didn’t empty my days. It changed what fills them.
And it isn’t only for people with a farmhouse and a garden and a flexible schedule. I know it looks that way in pictures. But the heart of it travels anywhere. You can practice slow living in a city apartment by cooking one real meal a week and eating it without a screen. You can practice it by saying no to one thing you don’t want to do. The setting is not the point. The attention is the point.
I’m not here to tell anyone how to live. I know the road that brought me to this wasn’t a gentle one, and I know slowness is easier for some people to reach than others. But if the question what is slow living is one you keep circling back to, I’d guess some part of you is already tired of the fast version. That tiredness is worth listening to.
A gentle place to start
If you want to try it, don’t overhaul your whole life this weekend. That’s just fast living wearing a slower coat. Pick one thing. Make coffee slowly tomorrow and drink it before you touch your phone. Cook dinner from scratch once this week and let it take as long as it takes. Notice how it feels. That noticing is the whole practice, and everything else grows from it.
Slow living gave me my life back in a season when I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I don’t think it’s a cure for anything, and I won’t pretend it is. But it’s a softer, truer way to spend the days we get. If you’re here, reading this far, I think you already feel the pull. There’s no rush. Pull up a chair.
