​Is slowness something you can’t afford, or something you’ve never learned to practice?

​This seminar is an attempt to recover the older sense of slowness as a demanding posture rather than a soft one, and discipline as the precondition for a life worth living rather than a constraint on it.

​We've inherited two impoverished vocabularies. "Slow living" arrives as the curated refusal of hustle culture. "Discipline" arrives as either elitist judgment or grim self-denial, something imposed rather than chosen. Both framings flatten what older traditions understood: that a deliberate life requires sustained interior work, and that the capacity to sit with difficulty is what makes contemplation, attention, and meaning possible at all.

​We'll work from short readings (a section of Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture and the "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" chapter of Walden, ~60 pages total), but the readings are scaffolding for the conversation, not the focus.

​Questions we'll work through together:

• ​What is the difference between rest and distraction? Why is it so difficult to do nothing without reaching for something?

• ​Why has discipline come to feel like an elitist imposition? Whose interests does that framing serve?

• ​Is slowness a luxury, a discipline, or a refusal? And does the answer change the cost?

• ​What can't be perceived, made, or known at the speed at which we currently live?

• ​What practices have you tried to install, and what made them stick or fail?

​Bring the readings, bring honesty about your own life, and bring a willingness to be uncomfortable. The conversation will be better for it.

​Your host

​Anu Pandey, who has a weekly newsletter with thousands of readers and writes about what happens when society chooses comfort over truth.