Since moving to my new home, I’ve found myself spending a surprising amount of time not only thinking about how it should look, but how I want it to feel. I’ve thought about bookshelves to create cozy corners for reading, lamps, pictures and old pieces of furniture to create rooms that feel warm, characterful and lived in. Alongside all of that, I’ve also noticed another feeling – an urge to get it finished. An almost frantic desire to find the right things, fill the empty spaces and simply complete the rooms and get everything sorted so that I can finally sit back and enjoy the home I have created. But recently I caught myself wondering
What exactly am I rushing towards?
That question came to me after reading an interview in Country Living magazine about a designer’s approach to her home, who described an interior that had developed slowly; one filled with books, quilts, old furniture and objects accumulated over a lifetime rather than chosen to satisfy a particular trend. What struck me wasn’t really the country-house / cottagecore style she had chosen, but the philosophy beneath it. I heard permission. Permission for a home to evolve slowly. Permission not to know exactly what every room will eventually look like. Permission to choose something because I love it rather than because it fits a scheme, and permission to leave a space unfinished until I find the thing that belongs there. And even deeper that, I heard permission to stop rushing.
We live in a culture that encourages us to see almost everything as something to improve. Our homes, our bodies, our careers, our relationships, our productivity, even ourselves. There is always another version waiting somewhere ahead of us. A better room, a better routine, a better job, a better body, a better life. We can become so busy constructing that future life that we barely inhabit the one we already have.
What happens when I stop rushing to construct a future life and start inhabiting the one I’m actually living?
I keep returning to that question.
I find myself increasingly drawn to older ways of living. I don’t believe the past was better, it certainly wasn’t. I’m fascinated with the 1940s but not as nostalgia for a perfect past, but as a study in everyday rhythms, its fashions, domestic rituals and the slower cadence of days when life was organised around seasons and routines rather than constant novelty. I don’t want to recreate that era, but it has made me notice how unusual our hurried lives feel now. Slow living isn’t really about moving to the countryside, baking bread or rejecting modern life, it’s simply about becoming more present to our own lives.
Earlier this week, my daughter reminded me of something I hadn’t realised I needed to hear – you don’t have to earn relaxation. You can simply relax. I realised how often I unconsciously treat rest as something that comes after work is finished, after the house is sorted, after I’ve done something useful. As though simply sitting with a book, pottering around my home or doing absolutely nothing needs to be justified by sufficient productivity beforehand. So maybe that is another part of learning to live more slowly – letting go of the idea that rest must be earned.
A home is more than somewhere we keep our belongings. Our surroundings affect how we experience our days. Soft lights at the end of an exhausting afternoon, a chair we instinctively curl into, books within reach, music playing from another room. The familiar scent of coffee or something cooking, a blanket that has softened with age, flowers brought in from the garden and objects that remind us of people, places and earlier versions of ourselves. None of these things are particularly important on their own, but together they can tell the body you can settle here.
Our homes can support our emotional wellbeing not because they are perfect, but because they become familiar. They hold our routines, our memories and rituals. They offer small sensory cues of comfort and safety in a world that can often feel noisy, demanding and relentlessly fast. One of the ideas in the article that stayed with me was the notion of creating a home that feels better than the outside world on most days. There was a time when I might have interpreted that as hiding from life but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps making home somewhere we genuinely want to be, isn’t withdrawal at all and staying in isn’t automatically the lesser choice.
There is also another idea tangled up in slow living for me: enoughness. So much of modern life whispers more. More achievement, more possessions, more experiences, more improvement, more evidence that our lives are going somewhere. Slow living on the other hand asks a different question. What if this is enough?
What if the room doesn’t need to be finished before I sit in it? What if the house doesn’t need to become the home I imagine overnight? What if I don’t either? Perhaps both me and my home can evolve. A bookshelf can wait until I find the right one; a blank wall can remain blank; an old piece of furniture can arrive unexpectedly and become something I couldn’t have planned. Books can multiply; paint can fade and objects can acquire scratches and stories. A home can become rather than be designed, and a life can too.
I’m beginning to think that slow living isn’t primarily about doing everything slowly. It’s about not rushing past your own life. Slow living is noticing what is already here, creating surroundings that help you exhale, allowing things to take the time they take and paying attention to what genuinely feels good rather than what you’re told should feel good. Most importantly, it’s resisting the idea that life begins only when everything falls into place.
This unfinished room, this ordinary Sunday morning, this cup of tea and the book beside me – these are not a rehearsal. This is my life and I would quite like to be here for it.
Patrizia Pisano 