A Weekend at Its Proper Speed

We left the phones in our coats and took the weekend at walking pace: ride into the city, a long lunch at a Japanese place in Chinatown, and an afternoon spent building birds. The lunch was entirely vegetarian, which people still treat as a subtraction — but skip the fish, skip the more obvious meat, and what's left of Japanese cooking is just as amazing. The game Wingspan is one of my favourite games. You spend the first half of the game gathering food and laying eggs that seem to do nothing, and only later does the small machine you've assembled begin to sing. There's no way to rush it. Slow living gets talked about as though it were mostly about doing less, but sitting across a table for three hours, it felt more like doing one thing at its proper speed. The city was loud and at home inside, the whole afternoon fit into a handful of cardboard habitats, and that was enough.