What we mean by slow

“Slow” has been having a long decade.

There are slow magazines, slow cookbooks, slow newsletters, slow furniture, slow fashion, slow living, slow productivity, slow Sundays. Most of the time, “slow” in these phrases is an aesthetic. It means: linen curtains. It means: a wide marble counter with one orange on it. It means: the photograph of a hand pouring water into a teapot, at a slight angle, in 4500K light.

This is fine. Aesthetics are allowed to exist. But it is not, in our use of the word, what we mean.

What we mean by slow is descriptive, not decorative. It is a statement about how long a thing takes. Not how it looks. Not what virtue it confers. How long it takes.

A short list, then. Things that are slow, by our definition:

• A recovery from a major bodily event. (Six months. Twelve months. Sometimes years.)
• A relationship that becomes a long marriage. (Decades.)
• Learning to actually cook, as opposed to following recipes. (Years.)
• Learning to write a sentence that does what you wanted it to do. (Years.)
• Grief. (Forever, but in a different shape.)
• A pregnancy. (Forty weeks, sometimes a few more or a few less, and you cannot rush the last three.)
• A studio, started small, that you intend to be doing in ten years. (Ten years, at minimum.)
• A friendship that becomes the kind a person can actually rely on. (Years.)
• Reading a book that is hard. (Months.)
• A garden, in the sense of soil that is actually good, in the sense of knowing which corner gets sun in May versus August. (Several years.)

Notice what unites this list. None of these things are slow because someone has chosen slowness. They are slow because they are, in their nature, processes that take a certain amount of time. You can sometimes make them faster, by some small percentage, with great effort. You cannot make them fast.

This is, we think, what got mostly lost in the slow-as-aesthetic decade. The point of the word is not to be a virtue. The point of the word is to describe a category of human experience — possibly the most important category — that simply does not work on a quarterly timeline. Grief is slow. Love is slow. Pregnancy is slow. A studio is slow. Cooking, real cooking, is slow. None of this is romantic. It is just a fact about the kind of process they are.

The reason we make things at the studio for slow processes is not because slowness is morally superior to speed. It is because most of what people sell you is for the fast parts of your life — the parts that move at the speed of a phone, a feed, a quarter. Almost no one is making good tools for the slow parts. The fourth trimester is slow. The grief year is slow. The first year of a real friendship is slow. These are huge, formative seasons of a life. And there is, in the world, an alarming undersupply of good objects for them.

We are not going to fix this. We are just going to make a few of those objects, slowly, ourselves.

If “slow” means anything that has not been ruined, it probably means: of, or pertaining to, processes that take exactly as long as they take. It is not a vibe. It is a description.

We make things for the things that take as long as they take.