Tag Archives: walking slowly

Resisting Explaining

Nicole Land thinking with Angélique Sanders, Kassandra Rodriguez Almonte, and Angela Chow

Today we went to a walk with a steamy/sweaty/dripping/raining/foggy quad – it was this unexpected, unfamiliar phenomena where the quad seemed to trap the warm air after a rainstorm, filling the quad with a dense, heavy mist as though it was raining from all directions.

The “rain” caused us and the children who noticed it to stop, to ask “what just happened”, but not necessarily to seek a rational, science-driven water cycle/weather explanation, but to actually wonder: what just happened – what is this incredibly cool thing that this quad place can do, and how do I respond to it?

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Why Slow?

Nicole Land thinking with Angélique Sanders, Kassandra Rodriguez Almonte, and Angela Chow

We have been thinking about pausing and the hard, sometimes nearly painful, work of noticing carefully while walking (or being in a place) slowly. We thought too about how noticing draws us to other noticing – we have to respond in a moment-to-moment way, rather than knowing already what it is we might encounter and how we might engage with it. What I think has been interesting in our conversations is that we are thinking a lot about what slowing down looks like and demands: what does slowing down actually entail? If slowness is more than just a speed, how do we move slowly with the children?

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Noticing Holes with Slowness

Nicole Land thinking with Angela Chow, Angélique Sanders, and Kassandra Rodriguez Almonte

We’ve been thinking together about how we might build together intentions for walking with the children. We are careful to want to think with intentions in ways that break intentions from “rules”, but to begin to build the idea that we can walk with intentions, we can walk care-fully. What happens if we emphasize that on our walks, right now we want to think with going slowly and seeing what we notice, and noticing what places are calling our bodies to stop and spend time with them? This is something we’d have to return to often in our questions and in the ways we move, I think, as we practice having intentions for walking together. I am curious about setting an intention for the walk and repeatedly using that intention (slowness, noticing, seeing, perspective – whatever we are thinking with) as almost an “anchor” for our walk together. 

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“Clock” Time and Moving Slowly

Nicole Land thinking with Angela Chow, Angélique Sanders, and Kassandra Rodriguez Almonte

Angela has been thinking about slowing down within moving and asking “what is happening here” on our walks, which is making me think of the work that slowing down does. Kassandra has been thinking about perspective, which I think ties to slowing down because I think that we can think of speed as a perspective: adult slow walking opens up different ways of noticing at a different tempo than children’s slow walking. Adult running, where we are confident in our balance and run from point A to point B, orients us to differently than children’s running, where tumbling and zigzagging and yelling cause us to notice differently. 

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