06/07/2026
Slow Time and Dim Light -- an Essay by John Detwiler, The Produce Peddler
There may be twenty "news" stories you will hear today. Bam -- bam -- bam, one after another, they can all hit you! And doing that, you've been through more than twenty days. Each news story was someone else's story, and you've heard about all of them. (This is generous -- most people have a "news" story happen to them much more rarely. You've actually been through 20 months, or 5 years -- all in one day!)
But in Slow Time -- well, there's much less to grab you.
I mean, I think yesterday was pretty full of things, as days go. I held a market and chatted with a couple dozen customers. My daughter has gone to a ballet recital, and all my girls went to the pool. My son is pulling carpet off our dining room floor, in preparation for a hardwood finishing. It's hot, and Becky is doing a lot of watering to keep our plants alive. I cut some low-hanging tree limbs, to beautify a grove in my yard.
If you want my news -- that's it.
None of the stories have the bombast of, say, national politics, with the wars and rumors of wars. They don't have the flash and fire of even more local new stories -- no car accident, no theft, no large-scale worrying social changes suggested
Yet it is a day. A real day, lived by a real man. That's exactly how much stuff ACTUALLY happens in a day. That's slow time.
Dim Light
We're not used to this small living. It's boring. It's dull. And so we want things that will be more exciting. The sitcoms where people have more amusing lives. The news, where we see so much flash and fire. And then the lives of our friends in social media, with all the interesting moments concentrated, all in one place, for us to see. The podcasts, where people have more intelligent conversations.
These things all burn with an intensity of concentrated "happening." But reality -- my own really lived life, and yours, too, with the things and people really around us -- is much more dim, and subtle, and modest. It doesn't demand to show us its secrets. It waits. It wants to know that we want to see it. Then it will reveal itself.
THIS is why the ever-present "elsewhere" is such a problem. Every time I would pick up my phone, just to check my favorite news site, or to look to see if I'd earned a little more money, or to see whether someone had sent me an email -- every time I did that, I looked into a flash of light. A quick-burning flame, which often lit up, and gave me something to see. And having done so, reality remained dark.
Do you see what I mean? We have an analogy in the way our eyes respond to light. If we have been in the sun, and we enter a moderately dim room, it will look deeply dark. We cannot see into it, unless we wait for a bit.
Most of reality is dim. Not all of it -- I mean, those news stories are real things, that happen to real people. They happen to us sometimes. But most of my own life, and yours, is dim. When we live our lives constantly looking towards the brightness of the "elsewhere," we won't see our own lives. When we look back at our lives, we will grow impatient -- "why is there nothing interesting here? It's like there's nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to look at!" And probably, we will turn back to the brighter light, where we CAN see things.
This escape from the darkness into the brightness ENSURES that we never see the things worth seeing in our own lives. Those things are worth seeing. They are not intense. They are quiet. They are lovely. They are deep. And they are much more elusive. You know, the rewards of our own life, our own homely reality, sometimes just don't show up. They make a silence, and we have to wait through the silence. That's not exciting. That's not interesting.
But just as, if you wait long enough in a dark room, suddenly your eyes shift, and you begin to see shapes where there was darkness, clarity where there was nothing, just so we have to wait in the darkness and dimness of our own reality, and resist the pull of the intensity of "happening" -- and if we do, our eyes will shift, and we will begin to see our own homes, our own days, our own children and parents and friends. Our lives may be in disorder and untidy, if we've neglected them because we've spent so long with eyes unadjusted, and that may tempt us to go back to the "elsewhere."
But this Slow Time has things that the "elsewhere" cannot give. And they are things we need.
Read the rest here: https://theproducepeddler.grazecart.com/blog/slow-time-and-dim-light
