Time drags its feet, like a film reel slowed to capture a moment too delicate to rush. The world moves at its usual speed, but you’re caught in the in-between, suspended like a single note held too long in a song. Slow motion is a trick of the camera, a deliberate stretching of seconds to make us see, feel, and absorb. But in life, when days stretch long with waiting, slowness feels less like art and more like purgatory. And yet, if slow motion in film is beautiful, if a song’s lingering melody is haunting in its depth—then maybe this slow phase holds its own kind of beauty too…right?
Editors of cinema are great at provoking all kinds of emotion and thoughts through effective filming. One of the most dramatic of these is slow motion. In these slow-motion shots, the audience develops a heightened awareness where subtle facial expressions, movement, or environmental elements become more noticeable. For example, when the character Gatsby is first introduced in the 2013 film The Great Gatsby (I’m obsessed with that movie), the slow effect makes the moment feel larger than life and greatly anticipated. So much so that I can’t help but notice the fireworks in the background, the music filling the air, and the joy all around. I experience a similar awareness when time slows; I tend to notice things I wouldn’t have otherwise—my emotions, surroundings, and inner thoughts.
A similar effect is used in music to provoke emotion in a story. Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony does not rush to its grand, triumphant finale. It begins in quiet contemplation, flowing through passages of uncertainty and restraint, its energy building in waves. For long stretches, it holds back, as if waiting for the right moment to unleash its full brilliance. And then, at last, the organ roars to life, the symphony expanding into something vast, powerful, inevitable. Life’s slow moments feel like the stretches of that symphony—the quiet, the unresolved tension, the waiting. But if Saint-Saëns teaches us anything, it’s that slowness is not stagnation. It is the deliberate pacing of something grand in the making.
There is a heaviness in waiting, in watching the days stack up like unmoving pieces on a board. We crave motion, a shift, some undeniable proof that time is not slipping through your fingers in vain. But instead, we sit in the stillness, where nothing seems to change—except our growing impatience.
Slow motion in film, the lingering notes of a symphony, the long pause before something great—all of these remind us that slowness is not meaningless. It stretches time, makes us see what we might otherwise miss, and builds anticipation for what’s to come. Life’s slow phases feel endless while we’re in them, frustrating in their stillness, but maybe they are setting the stage for something we can’t yet see. Just like Gatsby’s grand reveal, just like Saint-Saëns’ final organ swell, maybe this waiting is simply the prelude to something magnificent. Maybe slowness isn’t something to endure, but something to experience fully.
