Slow and Fast

Sean McClure
2 min readMay 8, 2024

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To go slow or to go fast.

Both, but in service to the same goal.

You should only slow down to get back to going fast.

Brevity is what sounds good, looks good, feels right. It is fast because it flows, because it is natural. Life is dynamic, intuitive, automatic.

When we slow down we are frustrated that things are not moving. This is as it should be. We need movement. We need progression. Slowness is in service to movement.

Be slow only inasmuch as it’s needed to get movement back. The crippling mistake is to become enamoured with slowness itself. To forget about movement, buying into the narrative of sage-like stillness, as though we have entered some mystical realm of enlightened reasoning.

This is the trap. This is what will poison your work with hubris and delusion, breaking the emotive cohesion no analysis can achieve.

The slow, the discrete, the demarcated; these are a dangerous place to be. Those tidbits of scrutiny and deliberate reasoning are the succubus of your craft. They are worth just enough to edge your work a bit closer to intuition, but one step too close and you’re trapped by your own vanity.

For there is no brilliance beyond the borders of movement. Only self-drowning arrogance and butchered insight.

Slow down, enough to get your bearings, but do not forget yourself to idleness.

The forest eats anything that loses its way.

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Sean McClure

Independent Scholar; Author of Discovered, Not Designed; Ph.D. Computational Chem; Builder of things; I study and write about science, philosophy, complexity.