Do You See All That's Happening?
Frieren and the art of slowing down
“Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.”
Marcus Aurelius
Yesterday, I took a long walk, and for the first time that I can remember, I walked without urgency. My whole life, I’ve been told by loved ones that I walk “with great purpose,” code for: Stephen, you walk too fast. That’s true. I move in long strides, I multitask constantly, and try to knock out numerous chores at once. I brush my teeth while showering just to save a minute on the back end of cleaning myself up. When I walk, I listen to news podcasts and philosophy shows to try and maximize my time on foot with learning something new.
Surprise, surprise: very little of it truly sticks.
It never really crosses my mind that there could hidden cost to all this hustle and bustle.
So I set out across an old Civil War battlefield in Northern Virginia, walking with my dog to the northeast, with no goal in mind and no route picked out.
The goal was to walk, and when I found myself powerwalking, to cut my pace in half. The only thing I put into my head was ambient music, rather than the chirping of other people’s thoughts and opinions. That’s the scary thing about being a podcast addict; you get so accustomed to every quiet moment being filled with anyone else’s thoughts but your own.
Why did I do this?
I blame a TV show I’ve been watching. There is so much on TV these days with all the competition in streaming, so let me make a recommendation. It’s a Japanese anime called Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, currently on Netflix.
It’s about an elven mage, Frieren, who is reflecting back on a quest she once took with three friends to defeat the Demon King. Frieren is over 1,000 years old. Her kind lives a long time. As such, people enter her life and then leave. They pass in and out as time dictates, and she’s left behind to remember them and make sense of everything they made her feel.
Frieren walks so, so slow, and often forces her companions to match her pace. She isn’t too concerned about dying, after all, but her traveling mates certainly are. Some lovely scenes below + how slow they walk.
This disconnect between Frieren and her friends comes up a lot. She wants to stop in villages, rest, and get to know the towns, maybe do a little shopping as well. But mortality and the ticking clock of time nag at the others, and they’re in a hurry to get moving again.
No one is right here, and no one is wrong. Each character has their own struggle with time and learn from one another that there’s a balance to be struck.
Frieren has to discipline herself to accommodate Fern, her apprentice, who has a human lifespan and feels the urgency to move a little faster. She is, like all of us, kind of dying.
“Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.”
Marcus Aurelius
Fern feels what we all feel some days, which is that the clock is running out. Being around Frieren, who doesn’t consider the toll of time, makes her a little more aware of it and how much is “wasted” on trivial tasks and sidequests.
Begging the question: From the moment we’re born, are we dying…or living?
I don’t know the answer to this.
But I do know that I felt more alive yesterday walking a snail’s pace in the woods than I ever feel while trying to juggle three mundane tasks I hate all at once, like I’m in a race.
Maybe to be alive is simply to be present, focus on the task at hand, and to do it well. Notice the things happening around you. The world can seem awfully drab when you’ve stopped paying attention to the beating heart of the world you’re in. There’s so much beauty, death, and rebirth happening around you every day. Who stops to watch the autumn leaf fall from the tree and land on the ground, then says to themself: Ah, the tree just provided more warmth for its own roots as winter comes.
And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening. Slow down and take notice.
“We need to clean our windows so that the things seen clearly may be free from the drab blur of triteness and familiarity”
J.R.R. Tolkien