The sloth is slow-dancing with the universe, swaying in the galactic crook of its arms. With half-closed eyes and a faint smile, it is dreaming of the symphonic ecosystem of microcosm and macrocosm. Contemplating fugues and puzzles. Listening to the interconnection of what is near at hand and what is far away. Tuned into dozens of dimensions and grooving on the multiplicity of it all so hard that it is almost unbearable.

Sometimes I’m at a party and everything is going by very quickly. The patter of conversation, people interrupting one another and laughing and starting one conversation before veering off into another one, constantly changing course, mostly talking of superficial things. I am not unhappy to be there but I can’t find anywhere to insert myself. Even in the fleeting moments where the conversation turns to something on which I have something to say, by the time I’m ready to speak, the river has crashed onwards, the current like an old river.

Not just at parties. Sometimes even at work or with my family. It’s as if everyone else can hear an invisible metronome, so they know exactly when to speak. But I’m always a beat too late and reluctant to interrupt.

In the video game Frogger, you control a frog that must cross the busy roads and rivers filled with alligators. When the game begins, you start at the bottom of the screen, waiting for a space between two vehicles that will allow you to begin your dangerous journey across the street. Once you jump into the road, there is one key to staying alive. You must keep moving.

In the movie Zootopia, officer Judy Hops and Nick Widle go into the Department of Mammal Vehicles to get information about a license plate. Eager Judy is dismayed to realize that she must wait for Flash the Sloth to enter the plate number into his tablet at the slowest imaginable pace. She implores him, “we are in a really big hurry” but Flash enters each character of the plate number one at a time. The comedy is heightened by the contrast between the nervous energy of the rabbit and the total mindful deliberation of the sloth.

At the crucial moment, just before Flash enters the last number, Nick offers to tell Flash a joke. Judy squirms in impatience while Nick tells the joke and the sloth – after a few beats – breaks out in an ecstatic slow-motion grin and laughs.

When I was growing up, the preferred term for intellectual disability was mental retardation. Much school-house humor revolved around the word “retard” and it does not seem like there was even a brief moment when you could refer to a person as mentally retarded without stigma. Ironically, the term had been adopted by advocates in order to replace terms such as “moron” and “idiot,” which were originally terms for intellectual disability (though obviously condescending and stigmatizing) that had themselves been contaminated by popular usage.

The word “slow” has long been associated with stigmatizing depictions of disability. In popular speech, quickness is equated with intelligence and wit and slowness with the lack thereof. Cognitive assessments are often timed. We all remember taking school tests that start and end with the fanfare of a timer, a stopwatch, a ticking bomb.

Is it possible that different people experience the world at different speeds and modalities? It certainly feels possible but I’m not sure it’s quite as straightforward as each of us being hardwired for a certain mental velocity. Some days I feel fast and other days I feel a cloud over all of my mental processes. In certain situations I don’t require any time for deliberation but in others, all the time in the world would not be enough for me to think something through.

Marc and Helen Bornstein published an oft-cited paper in 1976 called “The Pace of Life.” The paper showed that there is a relationship between the population of a city and the speed at which people walk. The larger the city, the faster the average walking speed. The finding kicked off decades of speculation. Perhaps, as the behaviorists were intent to show, the difference in speed was a consequence of urban stimulation. Or perhaps it had to do with the economic incentives of cities, where time is money.

What is interesting to me in this paper is the intersubjective nature of temporality. Speed is always speed in relation to something else. Flash the Sloth seems slow in relation to Judy but he’d be considered fast compared to a sea anemone or a plant. Slow means slower than average, in the ecosystem in which one moves.

The word “slow” is of an old English Germanic origin. Slow-witted, sluggish. The first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is “a slow or slow-going person, a sluggard.” There’s an entry for 897, King Alfred’s translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care: “Thou sluggard, go to an anthill and observe their proceedings, and learn their wisdom.” We can see from this example that the association between slowness and laziness obtained at least from the word’s origin. But another passage from the same text adds nuance: “A man is often very hesitating in every action, and very slow, and men think it is from stupidity and cowardice, and yet it is from wisdom and caution.”

For thousands of years, we’ve been ambivalent about whether slowness is an impairment or a source of prudence and knowledge.

In his Pensées, Blaise Pascal wrote “When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.” I’m always impressed how insightful historical figures were about the question of speed, given that they never saw just how frenetic the pace of things would get. But the point here is that understanding certain truths has a speed limit to it, perhaps because gaining knowledge is a process rather than the accumulation of some metaphysical substance. We can’t magically absorb the content of books through osmosis. We need to think about each phrase and concept, go on the same journey that the author takes us on.

One more advocate of slowness I’d like to celebrate is Lyn Hejinian. Her long poem Slowly captures the resistance to modern velocity in a series of periodic digressions, lyrical flights, linguistic dalliances. It’s one of my favorite poems by Hejinian. In an introduction to the poem, she announces that she is “currently undertaking a challenge to the speed of contemporary life. So I thought that one possible way to undertake continual conceptual rebellion was to slow down and let the forces of distraction go right past me.”

Given all this, I must acknowledge that I am not as much of a sloth as I would like to be. I cannot take naps. I have difficulty doing ordinary daily tasks without distracting myself with music or podcasts. In other words, I am swimming in the same contaminated perceptual river that we are all caught in. But once and awhile, I try to appreciate my inner sloth.