This is a love letter to people who need some time to work things out. Slow days in a dazed flow, you get there eventually, picking up bread crumbs on your way, and losing part of each day to the birds who swoop from dizzying heights. Your theories are often complex and piecemeal - you wander through adjacent rooms, eyes full of colors, while others seem to know exactly how to get to the main exhibit, minimalist and hard-lined. Your utterances in meetings are like the dreams of a hermit, inscrutable yet possibly holy? You may spend a lot of time feeling embarrassed and out-of-sync, yet you cannot help but be fascinated by the glow in your peripheral vision.
ID: a photo of a piece of aged paper with the letters L-O-V-E stamped in black and a red cutout of a heart shape placed below the letters. The paper lies at a careless angle on a rough brown surface. Created by Ylanite Koppens, used with Creative Commons license.
When you wander at the pace of the glaciers, never first in line, always slow to dress for success, much less for recess, it can feel like you’re never contributing anything in a timely or practical manner. Your thoughts move as though through concrete and covered in molasses - you are hyper aware of the time it takes you to respond in a way that feels true. You may be prone to false answers when you do not have time to comprehend and let the response come from the eternal bedrock that is your gut.
Here’s what I can tell you. Time is your friend, and it accumulates the best parts of you. As you work, as you capture dribs and drabs in your journal, your sketchbook, your notes app, your conversations, they will add up. Nobody can take away the work you’ve already done - you have it forever, amidst all the distracting fluff and fuzziness. Trust that work. Trust your observations, crisscrossed as they may be. Give yourself the time you need. Oh, that’s part of it, you create time by being with yourself, in your body, with the people who have space for you to have time.
Your inner clock is set at a different pace than others, but that just means every second holds a little more for you. In fact, you live a bit outside of time, and you may find yourself dreaming of a world where time is abolished, where every breath has room to fully inhale, where each experience - a field of flowers, a moment coloring with a child, blocking traffic with 100 of your best comrades to demand a Free Palestine - is a world unto its own.
You’ve got this. I see you. You’re right on time.