Too busy for dry hands
Detoxing from speed
I’d been at art college for more than a year when I realised that the hand dryer in the loo next to the library actually worked. Every time I’d been in there, I’d waved my wet hands underneath the thing then tutted when it didn’t spark into life. I’d use my trousers as a towel then march off to wherever I needed to be. In October, I started working as a library assistant for a couple of hours each week (I get to use the date stamp and it feels just as good as I always dreamed it would), climbing the stairs each Tuesday to mind the book-lined wonderland. One week, with a few minutes to spare before my shift, I drifted to the bathroom to wash my studio-grubby hands. Thoughts elsewhere, I held my hands under the dryer, only for it to come to life. I realised that for the past 12 months I’d been in so much of a rush that I’d been too quick for the motion sensor to kick in. Too busy to wait a few more seconds, too used to marching to a relentless beat of doing.
When I first arrived at college, after 21 years of work, I couldn’t believe how infuriatingly slow the computer mice were. There was a rag-tag bunch of long-toothed machines that sat by the entrance to the Foundation department and, once I’d logged into whichever machine was free, the first thing I’d do was increase the tracking speed of the mouse. If I didn’t, trying to move the cursor felt like dragging a really twiggy stick through quick-drying cement. It was bad enough that the ancient Macs were glacially slow to load, but at least I could make the mice zippier. I used to wonder if I was in a war of attrition with the IT manager. Was he coming round each night to slow the mice down again?
Abutting the computer desks was a water cooler. Getting it to expel any liquid was painfully slow. Licking a rock, I suspected, would have been a quicker way to get hydrated than filling a bottle from the languid trickle it delivered. The thing is, I’d purposefully picked the most traditional art school in London at which to study, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to find that the electronics weren’t top of the range and the refreshment options were scant. The startling thing was how inured I’d become to living at a breathlessly brisk pace.
Living in a city for the past two decades has got to be one of the reasons why my life had run fast. I don’t want to imply that no-one is in a hurry in the suburbs, on the coast or in the countryside, more that the sheer number of people in a rush per square square metre is just so in-your-face in a city. Running for buses to get to work, pelting across the road before the traffic lights change, hurling yourself through a set of closing Tube doors and feeling as though every second counts in the race to exist in a place that would very happily exist without you. Time is money, nobody has enough of either, go go go.
This need for speed doesn’t bring out the best in me. Horribly often I’d find myself silently raging because the person in front of me was taking their time. WHY ARE THEY WALKING SO SLOWLY?. IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THEIR BRAIN? I knew it was a dickish thing to think at the time, but later, after a loved-one’s life-changing brain injury, I am ashamed at how frequently it would spring to mind when I was behind someone who was dawdling. Ugh, I’m mortified by that inner impatient ableist.
On a visit to Tate Modern this week, I found myself weaving between the crocodiles of visitors ambling towards the Turbine Hall, rushing to get to where I was meeting a friend. Darting in and out, overtaking and dodging… even though I was half-an-hour early. Whining about out-of-towners and their unhurried gait is a deeply unattractive urban cliche. Fran Lebowitz’s 2021 Netflix series Pretend it’s a City - the title is her instruction to slow-coach tourists who block Manhattan's arteries - was many things, some of them good, but ground-breaking in its depiction of a New York grouch it wasn’t.
Why are we - am I - like this? Beyond being a curmudgeonly city-dweller, it has to be because that the world is like this. It’s fuelled by superfast broadband, 25 hot takes of things that happened 25 minutes ago, apps for everything and the setting and receiving of Out of Office messages that read “I’m on annual leave but I’ll be checking my email”. We’re awash with productivity hacks and time-optimisation tips. With round-the-clock delivery options and everything on demand. With welcoming our new AI overlords ChatGPT and Midjourney, and hastening the end of the human-as-creator model. More, faster, worse. (There’s a great long-read on the “enshittification” of everything on the FT, if you feel like being really disheartened.)
Is this the dynamism that the Futurists dreamt of? The Art Newspaper’s Louisa Buck says that “what epitomised the modern age for the Futurists was speed - speed, velocity and the sense of acceleration.” When I was thinking about how artists have represented movement, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) was the painting that sprang to mind. Those whirring paws and marching feet whizzing along a pavement. I much prefer Giacomo Balla’s speeding sausage dog to his compadre Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913), but then I don’t really hold with cycling, nor with the image of man as a violent, pumping machine. Regardless, listening to this podcast about the Futurists and speed was fascinating. Still, I can’t imagine Boccioni could have foreseen 3am Deliveroo riders and Amazon Prime same-day inner-tube orders when he wrote his Manifesto of Futurist Painters.
A big part of my development into a raging speed freak was the job I did. Working on a daily newspaper means that you have to work at least twice as fast as normal human speed - as a starting point. Life moves pretty fast for journalists - so fast that days blur into weeks into years into decades, greased by deadlines. When you’re embroiled, everything is busy/urgent/fast/vital until it’s yesterday’s news and you’re already onto tomorrow’s or next week’s. It’s addictive and extremely motivating.
It could also be alienating. It felt as though my colleagues and I had a monopoly on urgency. Other people - typically the publishers and civilians who came into our orbit to feed the insatiable hunger of the internet - didn’t march to a different beat, they dallied, or crawled, to a tempo so slow we couldn’t really comprehend it, like a blue whale’s heartbeat or the erosion of granite. We were high on our own supply of speed - not the stuff that comes in chalky wraps and sears the very idea of sleep from your mind - and like good adrenaline junkies, we always came back for more. Because that’s what paid the bills, ultimately, but also because that made us - me - feel alive and important and constantly rushing.
It was exhausting and exciting. Tyrannical and freeing. There were times when I felt strangely safe when I worked at a sprint. After all, if you do something good in a very short amount of time, you feel like a bloody genius! If you produce something not-so-good, dashed off with a flick of the wrist, who cares? The body cares, of course. Blood pressure cares and the vagus nerve cares. Whether the work turned out well or not was subsumed by, eventually, the knowledge deep inside my bones that I couldn’t keep up any more. It took me longer for my brain to work that out, but I wouldn’t be writing meandering posts about art and that if I hadn’t realised I had to take myself off to the slow lane before there was a pile-up.
Making art quickly can be incredibly liberating. Don’t think, just do. Don’t agonise, improvise. But not everything can or should be done with time efficiency as its defining characteristic. And learning new things takes time and dedication. Do something. Keep doing it. Not for 24 hours, but for a few hours over lots of days. I find this simple truth so hard to remember.
College is helping me detox from my speed addiction. Through its computers and water fountains, as well as its more human way of operating. There are different workshops and studios, all of which have specific staff and opening times. No-one gets to march in and demand the moon on a stick. Instead we have to be patient and learn the rhythm of the place, get to know the dance of favours asked and given, understand when the technicians are likely to be busy and which vital projects more senior students are working on. Sometimes it seems as though I’m unlearning as much as I’m learning, and that both of those things are equally valid.
I was chatting to a friend this week, who first met me four and a half years ago when I was newly sober but still mainlining busyness. She told me how much less, well, mad I was these days. “You seemed to go at such a break-neck speed then. You’re so much calmer now.” I’ll take calmer. I know that there are two wolves inside me: one that’s sitting around doing bugger all and one that’s racing to every finish line. I seem to feed both of them the same amount but at different times, and so neither ever wins. Maybe I’ll think of them as two dogs, one asleep in its basket and one dynamically straining at its lead, legs blurring. Both of them learning new tricks, I hope.
Yes I had that too working in healthcare innovation, loved the buzz, but the impact on your health is real! 5 years on slow living & creativity works better.
Enjoyed the read. Thank you. I too seem to always want to rush around even when those extra few minutes wont mean much in the end. Living in a country which doesnt believe in rushing around and is doing very well without that sense of urgency always for every task is helping me try n reign in the beast.