Slow Down

Nowadays, it´s cool to slow down. It´s a trend.

Of course, for people who already lead a lifestyle in which rush, stress, and running around trying to get their head above water are alien concepts, the whole slow living movement might simply mean “normal life.”

I was raised in a hectic city during a particularly hectic time. Lima is a multimillion inhabitant city, and back in the 80s, it was extremely violent. Surviving terrorism occupied the minds of a child like me, and violent crime was constantly rising. There´s no such thing as “slow living” in that sort of environment.

However, I had the privilege of moving to Finland when I was 18 years old. The reasons for this I´ll probably tell you some other day, but for now I want to concentrate on the way of life.

It was (as you might expect) completely different from my home environment.

I didn´t even move to the capital Helsinki, but to Lahti, a city (more like a town to me) of roughly 70,000 inhabitants at the time (compare that to 10 million…).

There were more lakes and forests than I could ever imagine, and silence was the rule, not the exception.

Emil Gilels, one of my favorite pianists and artists of all time, said once that Finland was the best country for music because the main ingredient you need for there to be music, is silence.

These words are so deep on so many levels.

I was forever changed after my 4 years living in Finland. I truly got in contact with nature and that has influenced my life in greater ways than I had even noticed.

One of them is the ability to slow down. Something I didn´t have before, and something that I see many people struggle with.

Modern life is hectic and stressful. There are many wonderful things about it as well, but today I´m thinking about the mental clutter created in our minds every single day with so much information poured into us, voluntarily and involuntarily. And a natural consequence of that is that we are needing peace, silence, and slowing down more than ever before.

In music, one manifestation of it is very peculiar and interesting to me: Slowed-down versions of pieces of music. These have been proliferating all over social media and artists have been releasing some of their tracks with slower-paced versions, as if listening to them in a distant dream.

I have made such a version out of my recent “hit” piece, La Valse Perdu, after dozens of requests to do so.

If you´re curious to see what I´m talking about, check it out by clicking here.

Enjoy, and have a beautiful slow-paced day :)

Claudio.