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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 223 (Nov 23, 2025) — Art of Reading, Hurrying Slowly, Choosing Wisely, & More
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.
New to Sloww? Here’s what it’s about in a nutshell (which mirrors the newsletter sections below):
📚 The Art of Reading
I’ve found some incredible old gems on YouTube lately. This week I discovered another with the 1975 video of How to Read a Book featuring Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. Enjoy!
Pair with: How to Read a Book (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary + Infographics)
PS: You can learn more about this (and so much more) in the Synthesizer course.
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🧠 Featured Product: Synthesizer Course: The Flagship Course for Synthesizing Minds
🏃♀️ In a hurry? Why rush?
Some inspiration to slow down (more here):
- “If you must hurry, hurry slowly.” — Unknown
- “One who hurries has one foot in the grave.” — Proverb
- “The day you stop rushing, you will arrive.” — Anthony de Mello
- “Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.” — Francis de Sales
- “The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.” — Hermann Hesse
- “We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it … It is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.” — Alan Watts
- “He is a slow person, timed to Nature, and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons, plants and chemistry. Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
😃 Featured Product: The Hierarchy of Happiness: 100+ Powerful Perspectives on How to be Happy (Free eBook)
😡 A new way to think about ‘interruptions’
Not too long ago, I used to get very frustrated with interruptions while I was working. “Oh, the dogs need to go out? How dare they interrupt my super duper important work! Don’t they know I’m busy living my purpose?!” Let’s just say I was fully on board with this quote:
- “The great enemy of writing isn’t your own lack of talent. It’s being interrupted—by other people. Constant interruptions are the destruction of the imagination.” — Joyce Carol Oates
Now, adding a toddler to our family, I’m slowly becoming better at (but still working on) rolling with the interruptions. Maybe one day I’ll even fully embrace them. They are life itself after all:
- “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day.” — C. S. Lewis
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧭 Featured Product: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
🧠 “I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided”
That’s a quote from Fernando Pessoa. It’s a good reminder that not choosing is still a choice—not acting is still an action:
- “You’re not free not to choose (that’s how it feels). You’re ‘condemned to freedom,’ in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase. You’re fully and explicitly conscious of what the options are and you can’t escape that consciousness. You can’t somehow slip out of it.” — Galen Strawson
Pair with: Condemned to Choose: Cake vs Oxfam Thought Experiment (Galen Strawson Excerpts)
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
🧠 Featured Product: Mini Mind: 365 Days of Bite-Size Brain Food
☯️ Mini Guide to Ramana Maharshi
I’ve been immersing myself in more Ramana Maharshi lately. Years ago, I read Who am I? (Book Summary) and Be As You Are (Book Summary | 🔒Premium Summary + Infographic).
More recently, I wrapped up Maharshi’s Gospel and The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words.
Now, I’m bouncing back and forth between Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Day by Day with Bhagavan, and The Collected Works.
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
👣 Featured Product: Wise Walk: 365 Days of Enlightening Exercise
Joseph Campbell on Arthur Schopenhauer:
- “Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called ‘On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,’ points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature. It’s a magnificent idea—an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.” — Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth)
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
