The Velocity of Being: On Slowness and Choosing to Exist Differently

There is a speed at which the soul fractures. I don’t think people realise this. They assume it is violence, or betrayal, or despair that severs you from yourself. But often, it is velocity. Constant motion. The non-negotiable ticking of clocks, the sterilisation of spontaneity, the submission to "urgency" as virtue. In London, I did not fall apart from trauma. I disintegrated from pace.

I had to leave so I moved to Ghana for a while not to escape but to re enter, to re meet myself, to slow down, to be present. I didn’t go to Ghana for a sabbatical, or for nostalgia, or to “find myself’’, a phrase that assumes the self is something lost rather than something becoming, or rather being. I went because I could no longer keep living in a system where my body was a container for productivity, and my mind an inbox to be cleared. I went because I needed time to exist differently. To not just pass, but stretch. Breathe. Fold into myself.

I left London not because I hated it, but because I no longer desired the version of myself it preserved. Disassociating on the central line, I have become a ghost in my own body, buzzing tube lights, Google Calendar reminders dictate my being. Every breath scheduled. Every meal, timed. Even silence had to be earned. I was surviving the city by severing my connection to time, which, I now realise, is akin to severing one's soul.

Ghana, I chose, not as a return to "roots," but as a return to rhythm. To breathe differently. To experience not as a linear baton race but as a drum circle, recursive and communal, where the only urgency is in the beat, not the outcome. I arrived not expecting stillness, but hoping to witness it. To see what happens to a mind like mine when the WiFi drops and the sun insists on rising every single day, whether I care or not.

I began to remember what it means to live with the day, not against it. What it means to listen to your hunger, not the clock. What it means for a breeze to touch your neck and that be the most sacred part of the day. What it means for time to dilate around conversation, around market women calling your name, around the smell of fried yam, the laughter of children, the singing of roosters in the morning.

Slowness, here, is not laziness. It is protest. Against capitalism, against metrics, against the colonisation of time itself. In London, the rush was praised. Even pain was productive if you posted it beautifully. Here, pain is buried in the red earth and grows mangoes. You feel it all. You eat it.

I wake up to no alarms, just the sunrise. Sometimes I sleep through the heat; sometimes I don’t. The roosters do not need Apple Watch validation to scream. Neither does my spirit. I no longer feel guilty for naps. I no longer perform rest like it’s a reward. Here, rest is not rest, it is simply what happens between one prayer and the next.

I talk to women with their babies tied to their backs and histories written into their skin. They do not rush me. They don’t care about efficiency. They care about essence. Tomatoes smell different when you aren’t trying to get somewhere. I walk slower. My body listens to the ground differently.

Sometimes I cry. Not because I am sad. but because nothing is demanding me to be anything other than what I am. Do you know what that does to someone whose entire selfhood was forged in survival mode? Who only knew worth as achievement, and attention as affection? Ghana did not “heal” me. That word is too Western, too final. Ghana witnessed me. Held me in a softness I had not met since childhood. It felt like meeting God through mango trees, thunder, mountains, bustling markets and the complete disinterest in anything happening online.

Some evenings I sit under the sky and wonder if time is folding in on itself, like I wrote once, whether the future me is watching this moment and smiling. She knows what I don’t yet. Maybe healing isn’t linear. Maybe the version of me who was burning out in London had already whispered to the air, and Ghana heard.

In this life, I don’t want to be rich. I want to be real. And realness, I’m learning, cannot be rushed.

So I am slow now. Not because I cannot keep up, but because I choose not to run anymore.

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Slowness is not a lack of ambition.

It is a reclamation of meaning.

It is a refusal to let urgency rob me of essence.

It is an act of spiritual rebellion.

I am here now. Present, whole, slowly, gracefully alive.

Rubber Tree, Manhyia Palace