On what we lose when we are too busy to notice we are losing it
I went to a pottery workshop recently. Not for any particular reason — just for the experience. To make something with my hands. A mug, a plate, a bowl — something small and ordinary and entirely mine.
I did not expect it to stay with me the way it did.
The instructor kept saying one thing, over and over, throughout the entire session. Not technique. Not which way to hold your hands or how to centre the clay. Just this: be slow. More slow. The slower you go, the better and more beautiful it will be.
I am not a patient person by nature. Most of us aren’t. We are trained from very early to move faster, produce more, finish quicker. Speed is efficiency. Speed is ambition. Speed is how you prove you are serious about something.
But on that wheel, speed was the enemy. Every time I pushed a little harder, tried to rush the shape into existence, the clay would wobble. Lose its centre. Start to collapse. The wheel does not reward urgency. It rewards presence. It rewards the willingness to slow down and feel what is actually happening beneath your hands.
With a lot of help from the instructor and a little effort of my own, we made a mug.
And her words about slowing down — they stayed. Long after the clay dried, long after I left that room, they stayed.
What We Are All Running From
We run. All of us. Constantly.
Behind goals, behind achievements, behind the next milestone and the one after that. We make lists and chase targets and measure our days by what we crossed off rather than what we actually lived. We are always moving toward the next thing, which means we are almost never fully in this thing — the one happening right now, in this moment, which will never come again.
And underneath all that running is a fear. A specific, quiet, persistent fear.
If I slow down, I will fall behind. If I stop, even briefly, I will become useless. The world will move without me. Everyone else will get further ahead. The gap will grow. And I will have wasted time I cannot get back.
So we don’t slow down. We push through the tiredness. We skip the pause. We tell ourselves rest is for later, presence is for later, the small moments are for later — and later never quite arrives because there is always something else to run toward first.
The Phone in Your Hand
This process of slowing down made me realise something — there are days where I am not checking any mails. Not responding to every notification. Not half-present in a moment while the other half of me is somewhere on a screen.
And those days feel different. Lighter. More real.
Sometimes we really forget ourselves and we forget to live our life. We are so busy capturing pictures and photos on our mobiles that we actually fail to live that moment, experience that moment. We are clicking rather than feeling. Framing rather than being.
Those phone calls, mails, messages — they become such a necessity that we just overlook what is happening around us. We become so used to the smartphone, so tangled in social media, that we skip every single thing happening in front of us and just keep scrolling.
Is it a necessity? Really?
Sometime spend a little time with your loved ones. Skip all those phone calls and just enjoy with your family. Sometimes live that moment rather than clicking pictures. Happiness is when we enjoy every single day — and that automatically becomes a memory. For that, we don’t need to click any pictures. The moment already lived inside you. That is where it stays.
What Slowing Down Actually Feels Like
At the pottery wheel, slowing down is not optional. The clay makes it very clear, very quickly, what happens when you try to force it. It resists. It wobbles. It goes wrong in ways that are difficult to recover from.
But when you slow down — when you actually, genuinely slow down, not just in speed but in attention — something changes. You start to feel things you couldn’t feel when you were moving fast. The resistance in the clay. The way it responds to the pressure of your hands. The tiny adjustments required to keep it centred. None of that is available to you at full speed. All of it becomes available when you slow down enough to notice.
Life is not so different.
When we slow down, we start to notice things we have been moving too fast to see. The way someone’s face changes when they are trying not to cry. The particular quality of light on an ordinary afternoon. The feeling of a meal eaten slowly, without a screen, without a to-do list running in the background. The sound of a place you pass through every day but have never actually listened to.
These are not small things. They are, in fact, the whole thing. The texture of a life lived rather than just moved through.
The People We Are Not Giving Our Time To
We often don’t spend time with our beloved ones.
Running behind routine, running behind jobs keeps us more busy and away from every little thing. Or we just neglect those little things by saying — time nhi hei. I don’t have time. We just don’t try to skip one minute and think about those whom we are not giving our time.
It is perfectly fine to slow ourselves down and keep ourselves away from mails, business calls, meetings — sometimes. Sometimes relaxing with your kids, your partner, is not laziness. It is purely acceptable. It is necessary.
Even when we want to celebrate our success we throw parties — and those are necessary too — but having family time, those little things, matters a lot. Having dinner or lunch with family is really not outdated. It is just the glimmer of togetherness. A small, warm, irreplaceable thing.
Running behind every trend is not always cool. But finding happiness in little things can always make you joyous. Always keeping ourselves in business hours doesn’t really decide how successful we are. It just decides how busy we are. Those are not the same thing.
The Moments We Skip
We talk about wanting to be present. We put it on vision boards and in journal prompts and in the captions of photographs we take of sunsets we half-watched while thinking about something else.
But presence is not an intention. It is a practice. And it requires slowness.
Think about the last time you were fully present in a moment — not performing presence, not aware of yourself being present, just actually there. In your body, in the moment, with whatever was happening. No part of you elsewhere.
For most of us, those moments are rare. And they are rare not because we are bad at being present but because we have built lives that make slowing down feel dangerous. Careers that reward output. Relationships that get the leftover attention after everything else is done. A constant low hum of things that need to happen, messages that need replies, tasks that are always slightly undone.
And in all of that running, we skip things. A conversation that could have gone deeper if we hadn’t been half-distracted. A friendship that could have been closer if we had shown up fully instead of partially. A morning that was actually beautiful, if only we had been slow enough to notice it.
Those moments do not come back. That is not a reason for guilt — it is a reason for attention. Going forward, right now, today.
Slow Is Not Behind
Here is what the pottery wheel taught me that I did not know I needed to learn.
Slow is not the same as behind. Slow is not failure. Slow is not weakness or laziness or lack of ambition. Slow is often the only way to make something that actually holds together.
The mug we made that day was imperfect. It was slightly uneven, a little asymmetrical, entirely handmade in the most honest sense of the word. It was also beautiful in a way that a mass produced, perfectly symmetrical mug never quite is. Because it had been made slowly. Because every imperfection in it was a record of the process, of the hands that shaped it, of the attention that went into it.
A life lived slowly has that quality too. It is not a life without achievement or ambition or forward movement. It is a life where the forward movement does not come at the cost of everything else. Where you arrive somewhere and you remember the journey. Where you build something and you know what went into it. Where you are present enough to actually feel your own life as it happens rather than looking back later and wondering where it went.
Dear Self
Sometimes it is okay to feel low, tired, or fragile.
Life is not always about hustle and rush. Sometimes we do need a break — that rest where we are doing nothing but just sitting with ourselves and enjoying nature, music, or the things we really love doing. And it is perfectly fine when the mind gives such signals, those little indicators of how tired we might feel. That is not weakness. That is the body being honest.
Just rest yourself. Switch off your mobile. Say a temporary goodbye to those mails, those notifications, that social media feed. Enjoy that calmness once in a while.
You are not falling behind by resting. You are refilling. And you cannot keep giving from an empty place — not to your work, not to the people you love, not to the life you are trying to build.
The world will wait. Your inbox will wait. What will not wait is this moment — the quiet, the stillness, the chance to just be.
Take it.
The Life on the Other Side
Slowing down does not mean stopping. It does not mean giving up on goals or ambitions or the things you are working toward.
It means pausing long enough to ask: am I running toward something, or am I running away from the discomfort of being still?
It means letting yourself have the ordinary moments. The cup of tea that is just a cup of tea. The walk that has no destination. The conversation that goes nowhere in particular but leaves you feeling more connected than you have in weeks. The morning you do nothing productive and feel, for once, genuinely rested.
It means trusting that the clay will not collapse if you handle it gently. That the shape you are trying to make will come — not despite the slowness, but because of it.
The instructor was right. The slower you go, the better and more beautiful it will be.
That is true at the pottery wheel.
And it is true everywhere else too.
We are so busy running toward the life we want that we forget to live the one we have. Slow down. It is not falling behind. It is how you actually arrive.
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