Dr. Bayo Akomolafe
Writer, poet, teacher &
philosopher
“Slowing down is not a function of speed. It is a function of awareness, and I don’t want to make awareness a mental construct. It’s a function of presence. To slow down is to hack the machine, like we’re taking on other forms of body that allow us to penetrate into different kinds of realities—other worlds.”
“This space of slowing down, this place of achieving rest, this place of critiquing or diffracting modernity [can happen] right in the city; enchantment is never in short supply. Most of us are caught in the habit of thinking of escape as a way towards the sacred. If only we could leave the mundane behind, then we would find the sacred. But I think the sacred is more pervasive, more fugitive, than just something that is exterior to the conditions we want to leave behind.”
”Quietude, rest, fugitivity are spaces of reckoning with the banal; spaces of teasing out the sacred from the mundane; spaces of noticing that being at one’s computer can be a time of quietude, a time of ancestral connections. Our imagination of what the sacred looks like often gets in the way of our transformation. But we can be enlisted to slow down in ways that are surprising and unexpected.”
LISTEN
Podcast interview
Detail 2
Mauris egestas at nibh nec finibus. Donec ac fringilla turpis. Aliquam bibendum, turpis eu mattis iaculis, ex lorem mollis sem, ut sollicitudin risus orci quis tellus. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nulla lectus ante, consequat et ex eget, feugiat tincidunt metus.
Detail 3
Vivamus sit amet semper lacus, in mollis libero. Nulla lectus ante, consequat et ex eget, feugiat tincidunt metus. Donec ac fringilla turpis. Vivamus sit amet semper lacus, in mollis libero. Nullam sit amet nisi condimentum erat iaculis auctor. Aliquam bibendum, turpis eu mattis iaculis, ex lorem mollis sem, ut sollicitudin risus orci quis tellus.