Slow Down: A Reflection on Presence and Slowing Down
Please bear with me for a moment. All the messages I didn’t get to reply to yesterday, I’ll answer today. Before I run off to work the counter at my studio, allow me to rest for a bit and jot down this piece — “Slow Down.”
1
Using your eyes drains your spirit.
Traditional Chinese medicine has always told us: put down the phone, it saps your mental energy. There were a few naive years, not long after I graduated, when I noticed couples or friends at the bubble tea shop next door — prime time for conversation — both silently staring at their phones. I told my friend with me: let’s never be like that.
Now I’ve more or less become exactly that. Looking back, I even feel a kind of wistfulness for who I used to be. On weekends visiting my parents, I’d try my best not to look at my phone and just talk with them. I used to borrow stacks of books from the library for myself and for them. It seems, in hindsight, that I was so much more driven back then. My father, who didn’t want a smartphone, used to play the erhu and practice calligraphy. And I was still the young man my sociology professor called “the one who writes poetry.”
I went over to a friend’s place once. He and his wife spent most of the evening each staring at their own phones separately. I thought: I never want to be like that. Then, eventually… my former self looks down on who I am today.
Later I understood why teenagers’ eyes hold so much more light — because unlike us settled adults, they don’t have to manage so many things. Though some young people aren’t bright-eyed at all, because they’re scrolling their phones the whole time they’re out for bubble tea too.
2
We know how to reach the “simpler, clearer, more unclouded” version of ourselves — we just rarely manage it.
It should be relaxed and unhurried; instead it’s frantic and scrambling. That description fits the way we rush to work. Years ago I already knew: if I just got up half an hour earlier — even a bit earlier — I could go out for a slow breakfast and then walk to work at a leisurely pace. Along the way, you can actually feel the texture of life — the warmth of the city, the everyday human scene. You really can feel it.
But the reality has always been: I stay up late willingly the night before, and in the morning I just want a few more minutes of sleep, then end up rushing out in a panic.
Some things you can choose to do. But others, more often than not, you can’t choose.
Take gear reviews, for instance — you can’t say “I’ll only test premium stuff and refuse everything cheap.” That doesn’t fit the long-term plan for someone who covers equipment (you at least need to know it all, and stay relatable), and it’s also operationally impossible. But once the gear piles up, it becomes a rush job — you might not even get a proper feel for what you’re testing.
Sometimes I wonder: what if I only tested one high-end product a month? Of course, thinking it is one thing. Life doesn’t always follow your wishes — and you easily get swept along with the current. You need to split yourself into two people. One is the robotic reviewer. The other is the carefree kid who plays with paddles just for the joy of it.
3
Zoning out is happiness.
I’ve figured it out now: happiness isn’t complicated. First, it means having time to slow down. Only when you slow down can you feel things — you can think without rushing, or not think at all, just drift.
I used to be so foolish, thinking happiness was simple even when alone.
Now, whenever I think back to those days — leaning on the railing outside our classroom watching clouds drift by after school; catching a few minutes of breeze between gym class and basketball and the next period — happiness was that simple. And now it feels so far away.
So far away that today, to stop for a while and type a few lines slowly, I have to put my phone on silent and deliberately disappear for an hour. As if only in that moment of “slow down,” that stolen bit of laziness, can I find the younger version of myself.
I hope everyone gets their slow moments. Only then can we see ourselves — and truly live.