Elephant stories got me asking you, “what do you wish you could do more every day?” It was during my Master’s studies that the world first demanded I stop. I was deep in the “mining” of a research topic when a mother elephant and her calf suddenly appeared, the sharp, rhythmic flap of their ears cutting through the air just inches from me. It wasn’t the “expensive coexistence” or the academic gemstones I was after that mattered in that moment; it was the raw, heavy truth of where these giants were going. That encounter forced me to abandon my data-driven fastness to witness the realest thing on this wicked earth. It was a jump scare of the soul—a sudden, physical nudge to realize that in our hurry to understand everything, we are often moving too fast to see anything at all.

Now, every day, I wish I could return to that specific, weighted stillness and inhabit it more fully. I find myself longing to fast from the fastness of digital noise, swapping the backlit glare of a screen for the tactile grain of a physical book while walking deep into the woods. There is a transformative power in reading where the only “notifications” are the snap of a twig or the low, rhythmic hum of insects; it is a nudge toward a behavior that values the weight of a paper page over the flicker of a pixel. I want to do more of the slow work of filtering the static, letting the rustle of leaves provide the soundtrack to a story that doesn’t require a high-speed connection to feel real.

By choosing to read and write in nature, letting the wind turn the pages for me, I am trying to reclaim that sense of heightened attention I first felt in front of those elephants. We have fallen into being fast, missing the message of what transformative change really is because we are too busy skimming the surface. To truly understand where the herd—and where we—are going, we need that healthy fast from the complexities of the world. We need to sit still long enough for the truth to catch up with us, turning our journals and our jokes into a space where we finally stop running and start listening.