Notes on Slow Living

and my trip to Copenhagen

I’ve just returned from four days in Copenhagen, Denmark, a city I’ve wanted to visit for a long time. One of the main things I noticed was how slow everything was: people spending an hour drinking their coffee, leisurely wandering around design shops, or having lunch out with their young kids, who certainly seem to have a lot more patience than I did when I was their age. This idea of slow living is a big reason I dreamt of moving to this side of the world: I wanted less hustle and bustle and more walks in the park. Now that I’ve lived here for a while, though, escaping the high-speed chase of life is harder than it seems.

by Peng Wu

When I booked my trip, I wasn’t expecting to take my dissertation extension, but life got in the way and I only had about half a day to rest before prepping for the flight. The trip was full of finding restaurants, using CityMapper, and calculating the Danish Kroner to Pounds currency exchange in my head. I knew that returning to London would only give me a few days to clean my flat, pack, and see friends before my flight back home. I assume that upon seeing my family at the airport, I’ll finally be slumping my shoulders and letting myself relax. The reality is, though, there’s always something to worry about. At the end of every rope, there’s a knot attached to another. No matter how much I want to spend time with my family and friends, read in our sun-soaked living room, and stroll the aisles of Trader Joe’s, there will always be something in the back of my head, ticking. A clock, counting down to my return to London, to my next shift at the part-time barista job I’m picking up, to the looming submission of a job application. Without all the university deadlines, my brain seems to make them up.

Maggie Smith writes in her poem “The Hum”:

Sometimes if I am quiet and still,
I can hear a small hum inside me,
an appliance left running.
Years ago I thought it was coming
from my bones. The hum
kept me company, and I thought
thank god for bones, for the fidelity
of bones—they’ll be there
until the end and then some.
Now what. How to continue.

My friends and I have all agreed on the post-dissertation vibration — it’s at a low frequency but sticks to us under our skin. I can only hope that it fades, but it usually just fades into something else. As a student, it was motivating for me to be constantly weighed down by an assignment or a reading I should be doing, even on my days off. I assume that’s why so many Americans are “workaholics” — you’re trained to listen to the hum, and if it’s not there you just feel empty. I watched the Danes on their bikes, flowers in their baskets, and wondered how loud their hums are. Perhaps the emphasis on hygge — a word pointing to slow living and “everyday togetherness” — quiets it down, but not without concrete elements of social welfare and infrastructure. I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out how to incorporate that into my daily life, living in a big, complex city and entering a workforce that struggles with work-life balance.

I look back and think about the moments in-between all the inner chaos, when the humming quieted down. In Copenhagen, I found my favorite moments to be the still ones: eating the best pastry I’ve ever had in Lille Bakery as the smell of heavy rain and fresh bread filled the air, reading in the park in the sun, looking over the Baltic Sea at the Louisiana Museum of Art. I didn’t particularly plan for those moments to happen, they just did. Maybe it’s the indulgence of those moments when they arrive that matters more than the attempts at creating them.

Maggie Smith continues:

I’ve started calling the hum the soul.
Today I have to hold
my breath to hear it. What question
does it keep not asking
and not asking, never changing
its pitch. How do I answer.

Our trip ended in disaster: unprecedented lines at the airport made us miss our flight, and wait seven hours in the airport for the next one. We bought snacks from 7-11 and made a campsite in an abandoned terminal by a big window, watching the sunset over the tarmac. We read a lot, called our friends, and scrolled through Danish boys on Hinge. My annoyance quieted down eventually, and unexpectedly, the hum did too. It was a highlight of the trip for me.

The next newsletter I write will be from my hometown. The hum will remain, I know that, but I hope the voices of my family and friends will overtake the melody.

Further Reading

“I Worried” by Mary Oliver

“The Letter” by Linda Gregg

"Waiting for Happiness" by Nomi Stone

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What I Enjoyed This Week

Recent Reads

• Assembly by Natasha Brown. This is a short commentary on office politics, the “colonial legacy” of Britain, and an unnamed narrator’s attempt to re-grasp control of her life. It is both intimate and detached, written so elegantly that it’s gripping. A really powerful debut — I’m looking forward to seeing what else Brown does in the future.

• “Your Camera Roll Contains A Masterpiece” by Michael Johnston in The New Yorker. I’ve been asked a lot about my approach to Instagram — I won’t say it’s completely unfiltered, but I do focus on collecting accurate representations of moments and feelings rather than images that may present something. It becomes a personal archive for me to look at, a collage of relief and small happinesses. This essay is a really good, technical summary of how I feel about it.

Other Wonderful Things (CPH Edition)

• I meant it about that pastry: the cardamom bun at Lille Bakery. I ate two.

• Louisiana Museum of Art. It’s about a 30-minute train ride outside of Copenhagen, a lovely trip through the Danish countryside. It’s an amazing example of blending nature and design with a view overlooking the sea. We saw some lovely exhibits but my favorite was the Diane Arbus photography exhibit, which presented her work throughout the 60s. She had intimate portraits of marginalized people that exhibited the mere humanness that we all have in common.

• Tivoli Gardens at dusk. It’s a 19th-century amusement park, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. We went to sunset to see all the lights and it was really beautiful.

Thank you for reading.

Jeg elsker dig!

<3

Tara