Urgency was my default mode for a long time. Not because I was lazy about it — I was quite good at being urgent. I had systems and lists and a relationship with my calendar that would have satisfied any productivity consultant. I moved through days efficiently. I cleared inboxes. I kept things running. What I was not doing, I understand now, was living in the days as they happened. I was managing them from somewhere slightly above, checking them off, making them produce the things that would justify the next day's urgency.
The first signal
The first sign that something was wrong with my relationship with time was that I had almost no memory of individual days. They blurred. I could reconstruct weeks from calendar data, from photographs, from the trail of receipts and emails. But the texture of the days — what I noticed, what I thought, what I tasted — was almost entirely absent.
I do not think this is unusual. I think it is the normal condition of a life organised around output. The days become instrumental. They are not experiences to be had — they are problems to be solved on the way to the next thing, which is also a problem to be solved on the way to the next thing.
What slowing down actually meant
When we first moved to Portugal, I experienced something that I can only describe as a kind of temporal vertigo. The days were quieter. The demands were fewer. There was less to manage. And in the space that created, I did not feel at ease — I felt, initially, quite anxious. As though without urgency to structure them, the hours might simply collapse into nothing.
It took several months before I understood what was actually happening. The hours were not collapsing. They were filling with things that urgency had previously displaced: actual attention. The noticing of the light. The smell of things. The texture of a conversation that was not subordinated to an agenda. The taste, finally, of the food in front of me, rather than the vague awareness of eating while doing something else.
Attention is not a luxury. It is the mechanism by which life is actually experienced rather than merely processed.
The Portuguese relationship with time
There is a Portuguese concept — saudade — that gets a lot of attention from writers about Portugal, sometimes more than it deserves. But there is another aspect of Portuguese culture that receives less attention and that I think is more practically significant: a different baseline relationship with the present moment.
Older people here, in particular, do not seem to be in a hurry. They sit outside their houses in the late afternoon sun without apparently needing to be doing anything. They make coffee and drink it without looking at their phones. They finish conversations. They do not appear to experience leisure as a thing to be optimised or justified — it is simply part of the texture of a day.
I have thought a lot about whether this is cultural or economic or climatic or some combination. I think it is partly historical. This is a country that was poor for a long time, in ways that bred a different kind of relationship with productivity and accumulation than the northern European Protestant work ethic I was raised in. There is less of the equation between busyness and worth that is so embedded in where I come from.
What I have changed
I have stopped trying to fill gaps. When there is an unscheduled half hour, I have trained myself — with difficulty, and not perfectly — not to immediately find something to put in it. Sometimes I sit outside. Sometimes I walk. Sometimes I just look at something without trying to extract meaning from it. This sounds very simple. For me, it was not.
I have also changed my relationship with mornings. The first hour of the day used to be a preparation for the day — things to check, things to do, momentum to build. Now it is the day itself, as far as I can make it. The coffee, the light, the window, the valley. None of it produces anything. All of it is, I think, the actual substance of the life I am trying to live.
What I notice now
Individual days have started to have distinct characters again. I can tell you what last Tuesday felt like in a way I could not tell you about any particular Tuesday from three years ago. The details are back — the quality of the air, what we ate, what was said. This seems small, but I think it is actually quite large. Memory is made of attention. A life you cannot remember is, in some meaningful sense, a life you were not fully present for.
I am still working on this. I do not think it ends. But the direction is clear, and the evidence that it is the right direction is available every morning when I stand at the window with the coffee and find, to my genuine surprise, that I have nowhere else I need to be.