Snail Brain

Going slow in a fast world

One evening, I was rushing home, passing by the Oculus at Ground Zero, darting past the guys handing out tour material, and finally reaching the divider on Barclay and Church. I glanced down at my purple pants, which I loved more than any other pants. They were bright, retro, and sassy. If only Prince had written a song called “Purple Pants,” my life would be complete. To say this post is about pants is absurd, but then, in my mind, everything should be about pants.*

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

The light changed, and I stepped off the curb wrong, executing a theatric splat on street. Total humiliation if I hadn’t achieved “Who cares?” status about most embarrassing things. I got back up and skip-hopped home, thinking, “That wasn’t so bad.” In the injury department, I’ve been blessed. During years of soccer and running, I did all kinds of falling, spraining, and banging myself up but then got right up. This tumble would be no different.

Predictably, once I put my feet up, I noticed how swollen my ankle had become. Plus, there was that delayed pain. The saddest part—please get out your tissues—was that my purple pants were shredded at the knee. Do I even try to patch up pants that cost me maybe $40, that would entail exhaustive searches for just the right thread? The pain took over since I couldn’t even walk, much less deal with repairing my pants.

The next day, I trudged over to the doctor’s office and got a crutch, which prompted a fierce love over the idea of “slowness.” Unlocking my inner snail’s pace brought me a peace I’d long buried. As a kid, I was very lazy and took my damn time. There was nowhere I had to be. As an adult, I tackled my impossible To Do list as fast as I could, agonizing over things left undone. Now with my badly sprained ankle, I had to take baby steps to go anywhere. You’d think I’d feel frustrated not to be able to fly down the streets and speed-read through my work. Focusing on my ankle, just that, gave me a single-minded purpose with no noise, no “shoulds,” no To Do list.

Photo by Ineta Kluša-Orlovska on Unsplash

Years later, I’m facing that same divider on the street, where the temptation to rush through things is met with a giant sign that says, “Slither instead.” How much faster it would be to have ChatGPT answer my emails, do my work, along with telling me how tall Jason Bateman is compared to David Harbour (DTF St. Louis is bananas). It seems logical to breeze through creative, professional, and personal tasks, but it means foregoing the satisfaction of using my brain. Not to mention, AI generated content is appallingly obvious. Appallingly!

I think of my purple pants, sacrificed during a moment of wanting to skip over body-mind connection to get to the other side. Do I want to let my right brain atrophy in this age of AI-everything? It feels a little like that moment at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers when Brooke Adams greets her old friend, played by Donald Sutherland, and gives him that little smile that she’s still herself. But he’s been snatched.

So for now, it’s just me here, going slow and old school, sitting quietly with my pen and paper, scribbling at a too-early time and thinking today might be the day I wear my insane brown and blue horizontal striped pants. No “content creating” or “brand building” using AI, just me. But I must turn my pet into a movie poster.

*Feel free to comment on your favorite place to buy fun pants.