There is a line further down about listening to witness a person rather than to fix them. That line is the whole of something Samir Selmanović and I made at Epic Ordinary. I call it An Hour to Be Seen. One hour. You talk, and I listen, the way most of us are almost never listened to. Then, within a couple of days, I send back the shape of what I heard, your own story told true on the page. The First Portrait of Your Epic Ordinary Life.

If something in these pages loosens a knot in you, consider that hour a door. You can walk through it here.

Now, the chapter.

In the innovation lab at the hospital, the walls were whiteboards and the thoughts were sticky notes, a hundred of them curling at the corners. A team of transplant specialists sat around the table. Most of them on call around the clock, their phones face-up beside the coffee, each phone a leash that could yank them out of the room and toward a stranger whose whole life had narrowed to a window of hours. They were in the business of saving lives. If anyone had earned the right to hurry, to skip the soft parts and get straight to the deliverable, it was these people.

They did the opposite.

We had gathered to work a knotted problem in their unit, and they carved out time—one could easily argue—they did not have. They showed up. They stayed in the conversation past the point of comfort. Sometimes frustrated. Often unsure. They let the silences sit in the middle of the table like an uninvited guest, and nobody rushed to fill them. What they made in the end worked. It was efficient enough. The thing I carry, though, is the way they left the room, a peaceful and connecting energy trailing off their shoulders like steam off a horse after a long climb, where something had been tended, and you could feel it on the skin of the air.

I had no name for it then. I have one now, or close to one.

They were practicing unhurried design.

Tania Anaissie, who founded Beytna Design, once told me that unless someone’s life is on the line, every deadline is made up. Here was a team with actual lives on the line, and even they understood that most of the urgency we manufacture is theater. A set built overnight. Lights, a clock, a manufactured sense of emergency, and behind the flat plywood, nothing.

The things most of us design synchronize to four values, and are the load-bearing beams of a McDonaldized world. Efficiency. Calculability. Predictability. Control1. I do not want to cast them as villains. They built the supply chain that puts fruit on your table in January. But when they become the only values in the room, the room goes a little dead, and we mistake the deadness for professionalism.

The strange bit about unhurried design is that it does not always look like design, not as we know it.

It might look like a slow walk through a field with a colleague, no agenda in your pocket. A meeting that opens with a long silence nobody apologizes for. A practice of listening to witness a person rather than to fix them, or even to answer them. Sometimes it looks like noticing what is already trying to happen in a room, and getting out of its way.

Conversation, held with care, can create something that does not yet exist inside any of the people having it. Rob Poynton put it to me more or less that way, and Johnnie Moore calls these unhurried conversations, the kind that feel inefficient while you are inside them and turn out, later, to be where the real alignment was quietly being made. Austin Kilroy once asked me what would change if the goal of a hard conversation were a better understanding of one another, and we let consensus arrive or not arrive on its own time. And Mark McCartney has spent years experimenting with silence in conversation, the deliberate invocation of it, and found that a small group of people sitting wordless together, in a room or across a screen, can fall into an intimacy that talk would only have interrupted.

Slowing asks for more courage than we admit. It is a way of leading by attunement to yourself and to the people in front of you, and a willingness to walk into the work without knowing what will come out the other side. That last part is the hard part. We have been trained to arrive with the answer already in our hands, to treat I don’t know as a wound to hide rather than a portal to somewhere new.

So what does an unhurried designer look like, moving through an ordinary day?

She recognizes when too much speed is a form of avoidance, the busyness we reach for so we do not have to feel the thing underneath it. And she recognizes, just as fast, when too much slow is its own avoidance, the endless circling that calls itself reflection and never has to risk a decision. Both are flights from the same discomfort. She is learning, instead, to find the right pace at the right time. The pace of relationship. The pace of trust.

Too fast, and we become hyper-skimmers, skating the surface of our own lives, skimming past meaning on the way to the next polished deliverable. Too slow, and we become self-swirlers, looping in our own depths, mistaking the loop for descent. The unhurried designer ranges the whole line between them. She reads each moment for the pace it asks and moves there, fast when fast serves the room, slow when slow does. Responsively. Relationally. With a skill that looks, from the outside, a little like grace.

I could hand you a list of practices here and am tempted to. Add ten percent more white space to your calendar and call it margin, the fertile ground where insight grows. Spend no more than a twenty percent of any meeting presenting and leave the rest for real conversation, the way Rob and Alex Carabi propose. Before you design for people, go on a field walk and learn with them. Take three or four ideas on a walk in the woods rather than wringing a hundred out of a whiteboard, and let your body loosen your mind’s grip. Wake without your phone and give the first half hour of the day back to yourself. Put the phone in a drawer for an afternoon, as a way of remembering that attention is finite and holy.

These are real. I have tried each of them. They have changed days for me, and changed more that is hard to put into words.

But to set them down as a numbered protocol, Seven Steps to Slower Design, would be to do what I am arguing against. It would McDonaldize slowing, take a living disposition and stamp it into a franchise you could roll out in any city and get the same flat result in every one. The practices are like doors. Nothing more, and nothing less. What matters is who walks through them, and the question they carry as they go.

Carry when will this pause end to a door, and the door stays shut. Carry I wonder how deep we can go, and it opens into somewhere you could not have planned.

Most of what we call design is the arrangement of dead materials. Wood, metal, pixels, plastic, the cold and obedient stuff that holds whatever shape we force on it and keeps it. Unhurried design is the tending of living things. A team. A conversation. A child. A forest. A story. A self. And living things keep their own time, like a wound that keeps its own time closing, like corn that keeps its own time growing in the dark.

You learn to move at the pace of what is alive. Rush it, and it withers in your hands.

I think again of that room in the hospital. The phones face-up on the table, gone quiet. People who had every reason to hurry, and didn't. What they carried out of there went past the solution they built. A connecting energy trailed off their shoulders, like steam off a horse after it had climbed for longer than it wanted. A strange sensation evoked. You could feel it on the skin of the air.

If you would like to join the Porch Sit Revolution, you can apply below. No expertise required. Let’s have an unhurried chat first.

Join the reading group

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we’re building toward and what we’re willing to march for. If you’d like to support this work, consider becoming a patron.

Become a Renaissance Patron

Unhurried Design is a life-centered approach to design created by Jordan Soliday and Johnnie Moore. We prioritize relationships and reflection, going the right pace at the right time, to yield resilient solutions with less material waste. This blog is organized into four sections:

Jordan is lost. Often slowing down and getting lost. Stories on the stubborn art of giving attention in a world skimming along the surface.

Johnnie is still walking. Often walking and talking. Reflections from decades of working unhurriedly with humans around the world.

Just the two of us. Conversations, collaborations, and the things we only find when neither of us is leading.

Porch Sit Revolution. A global practice of reading slowly, sitting together, and letting silence have the last word. Pull up a chair.

You can support our work by becoming a paid subscriber. Founding practitioners receive a complimentary session to unhurriedly design whatever matters most to them right now.

Support our work

There was a time I was scared shitless to confront the unpalatable parts of my story.

Decisions I wished I could take back, regrets carried around in my body like cement and aggregates hardening into concrete, meant the easier path to take (rather, the well-trodden one) included keeping the stuff in the basement of my inner being hidden, tucked away like forgotten toys into plastic containers and used furniture wedged against the corners of shadowy rooms where spiders cobwebbed them into oblivion. “Some rooms don’t need visited,” I’d think, or, “I’ll deal with that later. Sometime before lying on my deathbed.”

Turns out, the parts of your story that are unresolved may be the most interesting bits you have to offer. But they require you to exercise small acts of courage to carry them from the basement of your inner being into the light of the world around you.

When I started the Porch Sit Revolution three months ago, it was partly done to form a small reading group and leaf through the pages of The Urgency of Slowing, my forthcoming book, and gather feedback. I had no idea who would come or how many. Since January, about twelve people—most of whom I hadn’t met before—have joined me every other Tuesday and with genuine interest. Together, we take our time, practice unhurried conversation, occasionally sit in periods of silence without rushing to fill the space, share unrehearsed stories, and make a practice of giving our attention to self and one another.

But my secret endeavor in forming this group was to make my life visible.

The Urgency of Slowing is a blend of memoir and research, what might be commonly referred to as autoethnography, where a researcher uses their story to analyze and understand cultural and social experiences. What started out as pure fascination on how hurry was affecting individuals, families, organizations, and civilization, quickly turned personal when my life went up in smoke a few years ago. If you’ve ever suffered great loss, gone through a divorce, or mucked up a situation, then you can relate. You know what it feels like when the ground is ripped out from beneath you and you’re looking for answers and the people you used to turn to and the religion of your youth can no longer give you what you need and the only answer is the deafening silence that remains long after the strain of your voice. Through this magical suffering I have learned that if you do not befriend the silence, you will be prone to panic.

The first day of the reading group, I sat with my laptop open on a small desk in my shoebox apartment in New York City where I was living at the time, and shared the prologue of my book with a room of faces I barely knew. My voice cracked in a couple places. I let it. I shared about my divorce, the dark night of the soul, standing at the window with a glass of Woodbridge trying to grasp onto something. About the silence that followed and the strange sensation that crawled over me when I stopped demanding answers.

No one rushed to fill the pause afterward. That was the first gift.

The next was subtler. Someone shared a story of their own. Then another. Each one unrehearsed, a little raw, the kind of thing you’d normally smooth over at a dinner party or bury in a journal entry.

I’ve facilitated groups for years across six continents, with executives and engineers and teenagers and transplant specialists. I know what a room feels like when people are performing. I also know what it feels like when they stop. The air changes. Something loosens in the chest. You can almost hear the masks being set down on the table, gently, like placing a glass you’ve been gripping too long.

That’s what the Porch Sit Revolution, at its best, is. A place where masks rest.

Michael Margolis once asked a question that turned something over in me: “What if your greatest source of power is the part of your story that is unreconciled?” I carried that question for a long time before I understood it in my body. Power is a strange word for it. It doesn’t feel powerful to admit you had built a mask factory so convincing even you forgot which face was yours. It feels like standing half-naked on a mossy rock in Spain with the clouds rolling in and no one around to tell you it’s okay.

But the moment you say the thing you’ve been hiding, it loses a portion of its hold on you. The basement door creaks open. Light finds the corners and the spiders scatter. And what you thought would destroy you turns out to be, somehow, beautiful, and if not beautiful, bearable. Always. Always bearable.

Lao Tzu expressed that in the act of genuine creation, “the doer has wholeheartedly vanished into the deed1.” There is a version of living where you are always managing yourself, curating, positioning, trying to control how others see your story. And there is another version where you forget yourself entirely, where the telling and the living become the same motion, where you are no longer the author standing outside the narrative and have become a character who is surprised by what happens next.

The first version is exhausting.

The second option is terrifying. Yet, I am choosing it, more and more. I keep being terrified, and somehow that combination is producing the most poignant work of my life.

I am watching this happen with others too. A person I coached recently told me she had started writing letters to her estranged father. She hadn’t sent them yet. She wasn’t sure she would. But the act of putting words to what she’d kept in her basement for years made her feel, for the first time in a long time, like the author of her own life rather than a character trapped in someone else’s.

Slowing doesn’t fix you. It doesn’t resolve the tension between who you are and who you wish you were. It is not a practice you undertake to reduce your many masks to one. We will always have masks. But slowing does give you a chair, on a proverbial porch, and asks you to sit, to sit for longer than you want, long enough to hear your own voice say something true, not something new, but the sound you make when no one is listening, which turns out to be the same sound the trees make, the rustling of leaves and creaking of branches, the groan of your being, being yourself.

Wendell Berry once wrote that “the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home2.”

One inch. That’s it.

It takes a lifetime.

Every other Tuesday, a small group of people and I practice moving that inch together. We read and share. We sit. We let silence have the last word. And sometimes, when none of us is the wiser, the doer vanishes into the deed, and what remains is a circle of ordinary humans, being ordinarily human, which may be the most revolutionary act available to us in a world addicted to speed.

Pull up a chair.

If you would like to join the Porch Sit Revolution, you can apply below. No expertise required. Let’s have an unhurried chat first.

Join the reading group

All of my work is in service of ushering in a New Renaissance. Historically, renaissances have preceded social renewal and needed revolution. They are the inner work before the storm, the slow clearing that helps us see what we're building toward and what we're willing to march for. If you'd like to support this work, consider becoming a patron.

Become a Renaissance Patron

Unhurried Design is a life-centered approach to design created by Jordan Soliday and Johnnie Moore. We prioritize relationships and reflection, going the right pace at the right time, to yield resilient solutions with less material waste. This blog is now organized into four sections:

Jordan is lost. Often slowing down and getting lost. Stories on the stubborn art of giving attention in a world skimming along the surface.

Johnnie is still walking. Often walking and talking. Reflections from decades of working unhurriedly with humans around the world.

Just the two of us. Conversations, collaborations, and the things we only find when neither of us is leading.

Porch Sit Revolution. A global practice of reading slowly, sitting together, and letting silence have the last word. Pull up a chair.

You can support our work by becoming a paid subscriber. Founding practitioners receive a complimentary session to unhurriedly design whatever matters most to them right now.

Support our work

Would you like to join my book-reading team for The Urgency of Slowing?

Starting in January, we’ll meet twice per month for 75 minutes and discuss a few chapters at a time. I’m looking for a small group who will show up consistently, read in advance, and give thoughtful, rigorous feedback. There are 37 chapters (as of now), so we’ll likely meet through June.

The Urgency of Slowing argues that slowing is not laziness or aesthetic self-care. It’s a practice of social and inner rewilding—returning attention to what’s real so we can build saner systems. Through it, we recover human capacities that hurry quietly erodes, such as wisdom, tenderness, and courage.

Modern life rewards speed over wisdom. Taylorist workplaces. Always-on feeds. Fake news. Fast AI. We skim our lives, fracture our identities, and burn out. The result is shallow decisions, brittle teams, estranged inner lives, and damaged societies.

Until a few years ago, I lived at a pace that kept my interior from being more fully unexamined. When conflict swelled, I reached for busyness and distraction. Then I burned out and my marriage ended. With my life stripped to the studs, I moved to a small village in Spain where the Wi-Fi never arrived and the bell tower told time every fifteen minutes. Without the usual noise, I had to face what was left.

Myself.

This book is a field guide from that wilderness, candid memoir braided with intellectual history, systems thinking, and spiritual practice. Its premise is simple: the shape of a society reflects the shape of its attention, and slowing is how we take ours back. When we slow down, we come back into contact with reality. We recover attention, wisdom, and presence others can feel, the kind that steadies rooms and helps cultures make regenerative choices.

I’m calling this reading team the Porch Sit Revolution.

A porch sit is an example of slowing: a simple, distraction-free pause. Coffee in hand, body present, senses awake. No performance. No stimulation. Just sitting long enough to return to yourself and the ordinary glory of what’s real. For this reading team, it means we do not skim, speed-read, or offer polite applause disguised as feedback. We read in advance, show up, and help shape the book into something evocative and useful.

The revolution is quiet resistance. In an age trained to react, we stop donating our attention to the loudest, most impatient forces that profit from our distraction. We learn to withhold our ear from what’s trending and give it back to what endures.

If you’re willing to sit with each chapter, name the strongest lines, point out the fuzzy logic, and say what you felt and why, you belong here.

If you want to join the team, please apply below.

Hope to see you there.

Join the team