Learning to Linger
On slow living for people who are bad at it
I used to find the concept of slow living deeply irritating.
It felt soft. Indulgent. A philosophy invented by people who had never had a deadline, a debt, or a driving need to prove something.
I was the kind of person who moved fast, worked hard, and measured progress in accomplishments. Slowness was not a lifestyle. It was a failure of ambition.
I was wrong. But it took my body insisting on a different pace before I was willing to admit it. The “efficient” way I was living was, in reality, deeply exhausting.
What I eventually realized is that constant forward motion can become its own form of distraction.
An identity built entirely around output and optimization. A need to always be improving, achieving, arriving somewhere. It feels like ambition — even like freedom in the moment — but it can quietly become a way of never sitting still long enough to ask whether you actually like the life you are moving through.
What I misunderstood about slow living is that it was never really about doing less.
It was about learning how to stop postponing your own life.
Which brings me to Back Bay.
I moved to Boston from Nashville three years ago. Almost immediately, something shifted — not because my life became slower, but because the city didn’t really support the way I was used to moving through the world.
Back Bay was designed for strolling long before anyone optimized cities around speed. The avenues are wide, but the neighborhood still feels designed to be experienced on foot — brownstones facing directly onto the street, dogs being walked at dusk, people lingering on the Commonwealth Avenue mall instead of rushing through it. Something about the scale of it makes presence feel easier.
And I began to notice my own life differently inside it.
I started walking Commonwealth Avenue without needing a destination. Stopping for coffee and drinking it there instead of carrying it somewhere else. Taking the longer route home simply because the light on Marlborough Street made me want another ten minutes outside.
I should say — I am not the poster child for slow living. I am a hot-blooded Italian. I am not someone who bakes sourdough or builds carefully curated morning routines. I moved to a walking city partly because I hate driving. Road rage made it feel like the more responsible option for everyone involved.
So this was never an identity shift that happened cleanly.
It was more like a series of small interruptions to a pace I didn’t realize I was committed to.
Over time, I realized I had been confusing motion with progress for most of my life.
Slow living, for me, has never become something pure or fully integrated. It is more like a correction I keep returning to — a way of noticing when I am moving faster than I am actually living.
It looks less like a philosophy and more like a series of small refusals:
to rush the walk home, to fill every silence, to treat every moment of stillness as something to fix.
And Back Bay makes those refusals easier to see.
Not because it is slow, but because it doesn’t require you to be fast. The neighborhood doesn’t perform urgency. It just exists at a pace that makes rushing feel slightly out of place.
And over time, I started to notice that I didn’t actually want to move through it the way I moved through everything else.
I started walking more without turning it into a goal. I started taking longer routes without trying to justify them. I started letting moments stay unproductive without correcting them.
Not consistently. Not perfectly.
But enough to notice a difference.
Slow living still isn’t natural to me.
I still feel the pull toward urgency. Toward optimization. Toward arriving somewhere slightly ahead of where I am.
Sometimes I still catch myself moving through Back Bay as if I’m trying to get past it instead of live inside it.
But I notice it now when it happens.
Which, I think, is its own kind of progress.
I am still learning.
Slowly.
The Ave Edit is an editorial platform exploring the art of living beautifully — with intention, warmth, and soul. Based in Boston.
