Porch Sit Revolution
An invitation to read and resist undue haste together
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.