Every once in a while I come across a person, a movie or an experience that introduces me to a new perspective leaving me with a thought that keeps me up at night.
This time it was a song.
I attended a jam where they communicated the songs in advance so we could practice them, and that is how I chanced upon ‘Falling Slowly’ by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.
For a change, I took the mic. I found myself accompanied by a girl with an angelic voice who harmonized so softly that I almost forgot I had to sing too. With a full orchestra assembled out of strangers from all over the city, it felt like living inside a movie for the length of one song.
The past few blogs, I kept looping back to the idea that slow is fake.
Standing there, three minutes into a song I’d known for a week, I understood how narrow that rule actually is. It’s a decent rule for work. It is not a law of physics, and it has almost nothing to say about people.
Because I couldn’t get to know someone in a rush. I wouldn’t want to.
I want the version of someone that shows up on the fifth meeting, once they’ve stopped performing and started forgetting to. The real story, not the LinkedIn one. That takes as long as it takes.
Which is what the song is actually about, and what the room was doing while we sang it. None of us knew each other. Somebody drops out for a bar and you learn they’re leaving you room. A glance, a nod, a foot count. Nobody explains any of it. You just keep listening, and somewhere in the middle of the song the strangers turn into something that can hold a note together.
Then nobody left. We stood in that room and talked and jammed till midnight.
You cannot get to the midnight conversation faster by wanting it sooner. You get there by sitting through the tuning and the false starts and the song, and then by not leaving when it ends.
A few minutes of music bought us hours of talking. That feels like roughly the right ratio for most things worth having.
Slow is fake when you’re building.
Slow is the whole point when you’re becoming.
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