Riding the Waves of Life in “Slow” Motion with Tiantian
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Welcome everyone to another episode of Cultural Coalition: Beiqiang Nandiao. I'm Victoria. I'm Yizhe. Today we have a special guest, Tiantian, a good friend of mine, a Chinese American with a unique perspective on slow living in the bustling metropolis of New York City. Tiantian, thank you for joining us today.

Hi, Tantan. Let's start by delving into your background. We know that you have had a bit of a journey through different cities and countries in the U.S. and around the world. So can you briefly introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a bit more about your journeys through those different places?

Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Tiantian. As Victoria said, I'm Chinese American. So I was born in China, moved to the U.S. when I was three, and I've lived here ever since. I grew up in Ohio, so I have Midwest roots and core values. But after high school, I started to move around quite a bit. So I lived in New Hampshire, Boston, Austin, and now New York.

Those are the cities where I've taken up kind of longer than two plus years of residence. And in between my Boston, Austin and New York chapters, I did a little bit of travel as well, lived in Hawaii for a couple of months.

I really embraced the digital nomad lifestyle and tried to go to more interesting warm weather places and work remotely for a couple weeks here and there as well. So now New York is my home base, but I like to say I could be happy anywhere and I plan to continue to travel quite a bit throughout adulthood.

Curiously, living in the fast-paced environment of New York City, you embrace the concept of slow living. So can you share what slow living means to you, particularly in a city known for its hustle and bustle? Yeah, I'm going to start with kind of how I define slow living. And I think everybody will probably have a slightly different variation of this. For me, slow living comes down to three concepts that I've thought about and refined and I

as being very important to me. The first one is mindful movement. So I know you can't see my whole apartment right now, but it's very small and it's built vertically. One anecdote that I like to tell my friends is I have to take a step stool out every time I want to get a certain pot or ditch or something because my cabinets are very high and I am very short.

So everything about my day-to-day in New York requires that extra step and that extra thought to pull out the steps tool before I can go and grab the thing that I need to use. So mindful movement is a necessity and a really big part of how I think about slow living here. The second thing is conscious consumption. So I'm trying to be more intentional about

how and when I put certain things into my body. So starting with my morning routine, there is, I do this celery cleanse every single day, start with that, and then wait 30 minutes before kind of putting in

consuming the next thing. And so because I've sequenced my life specifically in or my routine specifically in a way where I'm being trying to be very deliberate and discerning about what I introduce into my body at what times, I'm trying to be a little bit more conscientious about that rather than kind of just resorting to a quick breakfast or something on the go. And then the third

Tenet of this, I would say, is presence and pause. I think as New Yorkers or people who live in big cities, maybe you both can relate to this. I'm always going somewhere. I have somewhere to be. It's most of the time going from one establishment to the next, if it's my apartment to the coffee shop or a coffee shop to the store or something like that. And I very rarely find myself

kind of thinking about the in-betweens and what it looks like to get from my apartment to the coffee shop. Along the way, I might just walk five minutes, but I...

It would never be a destination for me to be on the street as part of the journey from going from point A to point B. I think so much of my life is going from building to building. So something that I've tried to do a little bit more of is being very present along the way, starting to notice things as well. And what that translates into for my

my day-to-day life is I work from my apartment. I used to think of it as, you know, a glorified storage closet. Unfortunately, I have my work set up in one area. I have, you know, all my items in another area. And I would never think of it as a place to really just pause, even though that is one of the benefits of working from home. So something that I've

A reframing I've had to do in my mind as well is deliberately consider my apartment as my oasis, my place of slow living, where I really can pause and release before I pick myself back up to go do the next thing, like get coffee five minutes away. Well, I remember when the first time I went to New York and

The people who live in here give me advice about how you walk on the street and don't never stop in the middle of the street and don't block anyone. I know you also live in New York and also live in Beijing. Those cities know as well it's very fast-paced, right? Can you draw a comparison between the two? What similarities and differences have you observed in terms of peace of life, culture, and also overall atmosphere? Yeah.

Yeah, first of all, that advice is so on point. New Yorkers hate when people are blocking the street because our sidewalks are so narrow and everybody is kind of in this mindset of getting from point A to point B. I think the biggest challenge

difference I noticed about my time in Beijing. And for context, I studied abroad in Beijing for three months in 2014. So it's been a while since I've spent time in the city and maybe it has changed post COVID. But

I think maybe perhaps due to city design or kind of Chinese way of living, there is a little bit more time spent on the streets. So on a walk in Beijing, first of all, the avenues are very, very wide. So I feel like there's more space there.

physically for street vendors to set up like steam buns, food carts or something like that, or people to kind of like pull their chairs out and play mahjong in the streets if they wanted to. And granted, there are some neighborhoods in New York that are a little bit more conducive to this. But when you think about kind of the main areas in Manhattan, like

Soho, Times Square, Midtown, all of that in the in the nexus of the city. There's just there's very little space for that. And there's, I think, very little interest in that as well. A lot of that sort of like sitting, pausing, enjoying life right there. Activity happens in parks rather than on the streets directly. And granted, there are

lots of parts of Beijing as well that feel a little bit more corporate and where you probably wouldn't want to spend that much time because it's not conducive to sort of a leisure lifestyle. But I think in general, they're both very, very big cities, very densely populated.

On New York, you have this island of Manhattan, which is geographically constrained. Everything is built on top of each other. In Beijing, you have a little bit more space, I think, because of the sprawl. And that lends itself to welcoming a life of leisure in a way that I don't see as prominently in public urban environments in New York. How do you feel about it, EJ?

I definitely think the design of the city plays a large role in it. Like hearing you talk about how big the avenues are and the streets and how people do sort of can camp out. I mean, I remember coming out of my neighborhood and my building and like there were always people outside talking and, you know, there was the bus stop there and there were people who were getting breakfast and there was always this little like microcosm of a society taking place at any given corner. Um,

Yeah, where I found is that in New York, it is a little, definitely a little bit less of that. I think in the places that most people tend to spend their time, I think it's definitely, again, a bit more go, go, go, a bit more on the run. I think that if there is someone who's there, like, setting up camp, they're probably, like, busking their performer, right? They're not just there, like, hanging out. They're, like, also there grinding and hustling. So, yeah.

Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you said, Tintin. I think that there's similarities, but I think there's enough difference. It's so much so that, like, I tell myself I've lived in Beijing for 10 years, but I don't know if I could ever live in New York for 10 years. I think the feeling is very different. New York stresses me out. I think as a person from Ohio, I'm like, it's just so different. I completely understand that stress. Yeah.

It seems like there's like a baseline level of anxiety that comes with being here. Maybe you don't, I don't know if you feel it as a tourist or as someone who's visiting for a short amount of time, because it can translate into excitement and adrenaline and, you know, wanting to be with the energy of the city. But over a long period of time, having baseline anxiety is, you know, not optimal. It doesn't lend itself to a kind of optimal lifestyle. So I completely hear you on that. Mm-hmm.

So I understand that your approach to slow living involves elements like body intelligence, intuition, as you were saying. How do these concepts play a role in your daily life and how have they contributed to your overall well-being? Yeah, this is something that I have. I'm trying to work on.

And it's been a bit of an interesting journey to focusing on body intelligence and intuition. So over the course of the last year, I started to try kind of different modalities of therapy, both physical and emotional therapy. From a physical therapy point of view, early

Early in 2023, I went to a chiropractor. And I don't know if either of you have gotten a chiropractic adjustment before, but it's very quick. They crack your bones in all the right places. And then afterwards, I felt like I had the flu for three days. And I was like, what's up with this? There wasn't a strain of COVID running around. I hadn't changed anything about my lifestyle to put myself in a position to really get this sick.

I read about it. And apparently after your first chiropractic adjustment, there's this process called toxic release where all the toxins that are stored in your spine and whatnot are then kind of released from those joints. And that's one of the big, one of what chiropractors tout as the big benefits of getting an adjustment like this. And since then I've been

trying to understand a little bit more about mind-body-emotional connection. And you might hear things like stress emotions are stored in the hips, or there are specific points around your collarbone that release sadness. And it's a lot of this, we...

We have our spirits drive and our minds drive so much decision-making and we forget that our body moves with us along the way. As somebody who's been in a desk job for my whole adult career, many years of which required a lot of late nights, quick turnarounds, there's a lot of cortisol that's stored in my body just because of that stress. And there's tension in different parts too. So

It started out with me trying to diagnose and understand why and how my lifestyle, my mentality and pace of living were contributing to my physical ailments and areas of feeling tense or sore. And now I'm trying to be a little bit more proactive and

letting kind of how I feel dictate how I carry myself. And that leads a little bit to intuition as well. I had heard people say, you know, I had this gut feeling and I'm like, okay, my gut doesn't tell me anything except I'm bloated. I ate too much and I need to go to the bathroom now. I don't understand how people are connecting to their, to their intuition.

Um, so I started to try a new, a meditation based kind of form of therapy, um, that works with this thing called your third eye chakra. Uh, and I've also tried going to, or started going to sound based meditations a little bit more where different sounds will, that will resonate with different chakras or energy points in your body. And I've started to use those as cues to notice, um, and

and tap into my intuition a little bit more through bodily cues. So with the third eye movement and whatnot, I've started to

understand or be more attuned to when I'm feeling like there's, there's an opening and things are aligning. So when I feel like there's like full body relief from head to toe and whatnot, there are, I, I, I'm starting to notice there are certain moments that kind of trigger or inspire that feeling for me. And then sometimes, you know, when I'll like meditate on a decision or think about a decision or pray about something and there's just no flow,

I know somatically that there's just not enough alignment in my body to drive me to do something. So I'm still figuring out kind of how to progress that and how to incorporate that into big decisions, but from a kind of a day-to-day small decision point of view,

I'll give you one example where I very recently had a friend, had kind of two friends text me at the same time, like both happened to be in town, both wanted to make plans. And I was very excited about seeing them both. One of them texted me last minute saying, you know, I actually, I'm in pain. I can't make it. And I, for some reason had this visceral sense of like,

Oh, okay. Thank goodness. I don't have to, um, you know, try to try to stress myself out between seeing, seeing two people. And that was a cue to me, like, Hey, don't forget. You have to take care of yourself at the end of the day as well. You're only human. You only have so much time, so much energy, um,

It was very generous of you to try to try to see both friends. But I, as your body can cannot give you the energy to be present with both. So just trying to pick up on little things like that to refine my intuition and understand kind of how to how to make decisions that are fully aligned with who I know I am and who my body and what my body is capable of as well.

I was gonna say, I find it fascinating because hearing you talk about like mind-body emotional connection and somatic responses, it makes me think, and also just the therapy of it all, it makes me think of, I don't know if you've heard of those books that talk about like, you know, how the body keeps score and like all these other things, which are, I think,

sort of on the other end of like working through sort of personal trauma and things like that, but how it's a, as you said, a different modality that takes into consideration that our body has a lot of information and things that it stores in it as well. And that, you know, I feel like,

I even do this. I focus on the mind, right? Because the mind is so important, but I forget that like, if I don't move the body, if I don't have movement, if I don't take care of those things as well, that also affects my psyche. It also affects my mind. It also affects my emotions and my wellbeing as well. So everything you said is a good reminder that those things, although they can be treated separately, it's also helpful to think of them as this connected system. Yeah.

It's also very interesting. You said like, you think about like meeting two people in one day and make you some, like, you didn't realize it's stressful until you hear people like they say, some, one of them cannot make it. So thinking about that, right? It also like,

Living in the New York City, you also moved there a couple years ago. You don't have a lot of friends there. And you've mentioned when we talked before, you mentioned feeling lonely and isolated, right? So can you elaborate on those challenges, how you navigate them in a city that never sleeps?

Yeah, you, you're spot on with New York being the city that never sleeps and I'm somebody that you know requires a certain amount of sleep so that I can tap into this body intelligence and so that my body doesn't keeps a good score. It doesn't keep the score of me stressing myself out in my 20s. I think the

The thing that I find most challenging about trying to embrace this sort of lifestyle in New York is it seems still to be very much going against the current. I think, Victoria, I know you and I have traveled together before. And we very recently went to Bali. There are so many other places that bring out and

emulate and elevate this sort of lifestyle and living. And it feels very different when you're moving and connecting with people who have a focus on this as well, and who can, you know, share, collaborate, um,

exchange ideas and tips on how to embrace more more living um I think in in New York what I end up seeing so is so I live in the West Village um there are a lot of bars and restaurants around me there are lines of people waiting to get pasta there are people lines of people waiting to get into a bar um it's it's a lot of like it I think it lends itself to this kind of like

fast-paced, live fast sort of lifestyle. And for all of the reasons that we mentioned prior on the call as well, with the design of the city and the hustle and bustle and the kind of ambition, adrenaline-driven nature of life here, it feels, it can feel very countercultural to want to slow down and want to spend time like

attuning to and adjusting all these things internally so that I can be more mindful and present in making decisions. It's very easy to on any given weekend to say to a friend who asks you, are you free? Like, yes, I'm free. I don't have plans. But then it's another I've found to think, okay, well, how do I actually want to be spending that time? Are you free is one question. But then

were you thinking about using this time to socialize with friends and, and, you know, do this very certain thing, or were you hoping to use this time as a restorative day to do something else? Or were you, were there personal goals that you wanted to accomplish with this time? It's a whole different second order question for me. Um,

And I know this is getting into semantics and this is where my, my mind obviously takes over because I overthink, I have a tendency to overthink things, but I think even, even that question, like, Hey, are you free? Um, can be, um,

It can be very simplistic and can lead to me over committing to things in a city where there are so many things I want to so many things that I want to be doing. I want to use my free time to accomplish the thing or put energy towards the thing that I want to do most. But I don't always want.

I don't always have to be in a position to practically think about it because there's so much going on. The challenge with that is then I don't get to be proactive about how I want to be spending my time or it's harder to be proactive about how I want to be spending that time.

So, yeah, New York comes with a lot of distractions. There are a million and one ways to fill time as soon as you step out of the apartment. And I think a lot of the challenge is sifting through the noise and

realizing what it is that actually resonates with what you want to be doing at any given point in time. That's not to say that I don't love to see my friends and whatnot, but some days you just need a personal retreat day and you need to knock a lot of things out. And that means that you might miss out on, you know, going to a great restaurant with your new friends or going to a bar with a group of friends or something else. There's always something you're going to be missing out on. And

And as somebody who wants it all and wants to live life to the fullest, I think that is the hardest thing for me to understand and accept. Life is a series of prioritization and decision-making. New York is a place that offers a lot of options, but not all of them are going to align with me in any given moment. So just have to be mindful of that and know that

Your friends will be there. The events will be there. The museum that you wanted to go to will be there. The DJ you wanted to see will come back. There's no urgency or rush in getting to that in that moment. There's an abundance of opportunity. What you said about an abundance of opportunity is so important because I think when you get into that mindset of like,

hyper urgency, it like taps into that idea of the scarcity mindset. And then if I don't do it now, then I won't ever get to do it again. And then the FOMO kicks in. So I appreciate you calling that out and saying that like, no, like there are other opportunities. The museums will still be there. The pasta place will still be there. You can still go out and get all of those things. It doesn't necessarily have

to be today. And as you said, life is this series of priorities and decision-making, and we have to prioritize what do we want to do with the time that we have. So in that note, switching gears a little bit, you have a diverse set of interests, and you were talking a little bit about how you use your free time, and you like to surf, and you ski, and you travel, and you're into exploring. So I'm wondering how do these activities and how you use your free time complements your slow living philosophy?

Yeah. One thing I want to mention is I think, I know I laid out what I think my tenets for slow living are at the top of the call, but I do want to make a disclaimer that slow living doesn't have to be necessarily doing everything at a slow pace. It's more so around the deliberate nature. And the reason I say that is because two of my

two of my passions are snowboarding and a recent passion in recent years is surfing. And both of those can be adrenaline sports, depending on the style. Like obviously snowboarding can be very fast paced. There can be terrain involved, things like that. So slow living does not necessarily equate with absolutely no adrenaline. It's just being very deliberate and discerning in movement.

Um, and, uh, so with both of these things, I started snowboarding at a very young age. I want to say eight or 10 or something like that. And that's been something I've had my, my entire life. Um, what I love about being able to do something like this is it's both an individual activity as well as a social activity. Um, so it's not something that

I would require other people to do with me, but it, when I have company with me, it amplifies and makes the experience more enjoyable. Um, that being said, it is still something that I do for me. And when I'm on the mountain, uh, you're, you're still just riding with yourself, um, throughout the, throughout the course of the run. And it's something where I've

started to understand a little bit more the different styles and ways to find flow. The mountain is a really big place. There are so many different styles of snowboarding that any one person can do. And so it's made me think and been very mind-expanding

in, in making me think about, there are so many ways of carrying ourselves throughout the mountain. Like people can go, you know, engage with trees in a very different way. People can engage with it, with a run in a very different way. You don't even have to do the run. If you don't want to, you can, you know, like twirl and swirl your way down the mountain. Um, and so it, it, it really made me think about what is, what is the rhythm that I want

to have when I carry myself down the mountain. What is my style? What is my flow? What is, you know, my artistic way of, um, of engaging with, with the mountain? Um, similarly, surfing lends itself to this sort of like flow individual style mindset as well. Um, and, uh,

a lot of time spent surfing is actually spent waiting in the period between sets. And I think this is where

this is the dichotomy of both sports that I love. Snowboarding is very decisive. Unless you hike up the mountain, you get dropped off at the top by a lift. You can kind of map out where you wanna go and then you'd go and execute. But surfing, you have no idea what's gonna come down in terms of what the ocean is gonna give you. Like maybe it'll be gentle, maybe it'll be rough. Maybe you'll be able to take a wave, maybe you won't. And in those periods of waiting and planning and thinking about what to do when the next wave comes,

Um, there's also this period of rest and pause and just, you know, being out on a surfboard, enjoying the sun, enjoying the warmth, enjoying like maybe a couple of their friends in the water as well. Um, and that happens in a, in a way, um, where it really forces me to stop, take a breath, um, exhale, inhale, like,

close out the adrenaline of the previous set, get excited about the next one. And it feels very conclusive. There's also something about the way that the...

the way you work with the ocean in surfing too, where I've gotten tossed off of my board many times. And it's, it can be very terrifying as somebody who's not, you know, a confident swimmer or confident in the water. But only very recently have I started to understand that when

When that happens, you don't fight with it. You kind of just like let it pass. You protect your head. You cover what you can, you cover the essentials and you just roll literally with the punches. You roll with the wave and without fail, your board, which is a flotation device will end up kind of like pulling you back up to the surface when it's clear and it's ready. And I've,

I have a tendency again to read into things a little bit too much, but I've really taken that to heart in terms of understanding like when things happen in life that are unexpected and that kind of throw you for a loop or are really challenging.

There's so much that my anxiety tells me about wanting to protect myself, wanting to be safe, wanting to control the situation so that I can overcome it. But with surfing, what it has really encouraged me to do is just

let myself be upset about something, frustrated about something. And instead of fighting against it, just accepting it for what it is, like trying to make peace with myself and what I can control in that moment. And then knowing that it's only temporary, it's only a season, maybe you're only underwater for five seconds, it might feel like a lifetime, but inevitably the beating will end and you'll get pulled back up to the surface and be ready for the next thing.

And I think that has been most helpful for me in thinking about slow living in recent years where I used to love to plan out very linearly what the next year, two years, five years looks like on a long time horizon and try to control for these variables as much as possible.

But of course, life throws many curveballs our ways. And I've with this, I've started to shrink that time frame down and just think about what

what can I do to maintain a sense of inner peace on a very minute by minute or hour by hour basis? And for me, a lot of that comes back to, okay, having the practice of checking in with myself, how do I feel, distilling things down to the individual moment. And slow living affords that for me. Otherwise, it's something where

All right, I guess the challenge with having more of a fast-paced lifestyle is a lot of these feelings can compound

And we have no idea how to reach conclusion with many of these things, but we keep going. We keep going because we have to, because work has this deadline, because I have five friends' birthdays lined up in a row, whatnot. It can be very hard to find time to take a breath and sort through things. So then when it does ultimately catch up, it's already compounded to this level of it

it's snowballed and it's compounded more than it needed to. So with this surfing mentality, I'm trying to learn to shift into a mindset of taking things moment by moment, finding peace in the moment, understanding and enjoying the kind of period between sets. So then when the next opportunity comes or the next wave comes, I'm ready to engage energetically, physically, mentally, and enjoy it for as long as it lasts.

It's interesting hearing you say like the two of your most favorite sports, like skiing and surfing, they're like extreme sport, right? You can have the adrenaline like doing the sports, but you also can leave it with like a slow living style. So like when you say about like,

waiting on the ocean and waiting for the next waves and chatting with people like your friends on the other board. And it doesn't have to be like all the time in like fast pace all the time. You'll be like so intense and nervous about like when the next wave is going to come, what we're going to do, how I'm going to prepare for the next wave. You can be, you can just relax and like,

waiting there and just enjoy the sun, enjoy the ocean, enjoy maybe some animals around you. So I can feel like you really like have this slow living mode of life built into every aspect of your life.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it helps when those sports take place in very beautiful places, especially in nature too. That's one element of slow living that I know we didn't touch on too much of yet, but obviously living in urban environments, there's a lot of concrete, there's a lot of harsh material. Most of it is unnatural. And then when you have these activities that

fully expose you to the dynamic, unpredictable, beautiful, magical essence of nature, it forces me to notice things that I don't get to engage with on a day-to-day basis, like the sparkle in the water.

or the smell of the pine trees or something like that. So spending time in nature, there's been a lot of literature on how nature is healing, but then coming back to New York, it also attunes me to notice natural cues in a very urban environment, which can be challenging too. Like how many times have you walked around Beijing and sat to look at the birds or observe a bird?

I personally don't spend too much of my day to day in New York doing that, but I've started to and I've noticed birds move in a way that I really didn't observe before. And it's because, as you mentioned, Victoria, like sitting out on the surfboard, you see things like seagulls, maybe you see fish, maybe you see turtles, manatees, whatnot. There's a whole ecosystem of life around us that is designed in a perfect and beautiful way.

that we can take use from. It doesn't all have to be like moving with the ecosystem of people through an urban environment as well. And it kind of trains us to be more or to specifically be observant of these things that get lost or that are maybe more subtle in urban living environments too. So-

Very grateful to have time outside of the city and then very grateful to be able to come back to the city and recognize it for the crazy ecosystem it is. And also the, you know, the natural elements that still exist here too. I know you also love traveling and you just did a solo trip to Mexico City. I love to hear like what's your highlights from that experience and how it contributed to your like perception on slow living and like your current living style.

Yes. So I was just in Mexico City for five days over the new year. And I specifically planned for this to be a solo trip because over the holidays, I knew I was going to be spending two weeks with family, which is, you know, wonderful to be able to do. And I'm very grateful for that. But it's a lot of time with other people, not in your own space or doing things on your own time.

Um, so I, I wanted it to be, um, symbolic to close out 2023 and start 2024 completely in my element or as, as, as much as I could possibly get, um, in terms of having clarity about where I want to be for the next year. Um, and just be being by myself to be able to recognize, uh, and reflect on that. Um, I ended up.

Over the course of five days, I ended up making two appointments and then just leaving the rest up to flow and spontaneity in the city. And I have a couple of friends who live there as well. So I knew that, you know, if even if I don't go into this trip with plans, I'll be able to kind of tap into the community through the help of my friends who have moved there in recent years as well. And I actually I had a really interesting time.

time in Mexico City. And I absolutely loved it. The first couple of days, for some reason, I needed to release something. I would just cry at night. This was leading up to New Year's Day. And it would come out of nowhere. I had just come from two wonderful weeks with my family who energized me and support me and love me and accept me for exactly who I am and how I am.

I was like, where is this coming from? Why? I have nothing that I'm sad about right now. And yet my body was just like, no, it's time to rain. Like you got to let something go. And for me, I, I'm a very spiritual person. I took it as a sign of, you know, in order to close out this chapter, that is 2023. Um, there was a lot that, that happened a lot that you worked through. You can kind of let that go and leave that in the past and start with a blank slate and get excited about 2024. Um,

unburdened and uninhibited by these, these feelings that might still linger or, um, that, that arose because of what happened in the past year. Um, so that, that was kind of an interesting experience. I didn't expect to be, you know, bawling my eyes out by myself on the years, even in Mexico city. Um, but I was very, very grateful to have that release. Um, then the

the day after New Year's, I, one of my two appointments was this cacao ceremony. And cacao is this healing medicine that many Latin and South American cultures use. It's,

it's what chocolate is derived from. So, you know, it's a very safe thing to consume in the right dosage and ends up, you know, being the basis for candy that I love. But when used in a ceremony and traditional kind of healing sense,

It can be something that physically actually slows us down, increases vitality in blood flow, but physically slows us down and is also used as a heart opener. So I went into this ceremony with the intention of trying to understand or trying to get some clarity on how I want to be sharing my heart more with others.

with more people over the course of the next year. I love to travel. Similar to both of you, I'm really curious about people's stories about what makes a certain environment and people in that environment live the way that they do because of all of the things we talked about earlier with the challenges of wanting to live

with a slow living mindset in a fast paced city. So I really enjoy having exchanges and being able to share my heart and build connections with people when I travel and then use those to inspire how I think about how I want to carry myself throughout New York as well. And I think having

having that physical, again, this physically healing experience early on in my trip made me or helped me to be more observant of things in the lifestyle and culture of Mexico City outside of having beautiful architecture, having an abundance of green spaces.

the people there are just really dynamic as well. I remember taking a stroll and just seeing people enjoy life on the streets, similar, not too different from what we were talking about in Beijing. And just having this free-spirited nature of

being outside, enjoying life for what it is. And granted, there is still kind of this, there is still with any place a darkness and underbelly of city living, especially in a place like Mexico, where, you know, the cartels are still very active. There are still a lot of challenges and potential dangers with living in a big urban environment. But

Despite all of that, people were actually just living on the streets. One of my friends actually said that to me, life here is on the streets. People live in public places.

they kind of bring their life in its spillover and it's engaging and kind of transcending beyond the physical walls that we have around our homes and our personal space, which I thought was really beautiful and a really great reminder of one, the importance of communal spaces where people feel like they can gather and have agency to access that space.

But then also, too, it made me wonder what something, what New York would look like if we had a designated space where everybody was encouraged to kind of go out of their apartments and

spend time on the sidewalk, like literally bring your table or something onto the sidewalk and just enjoy life there. I think that was probably what COVID looked like for many people in New York. I wasn't here during the pandemic, but I saw a lot of content on Instagram about people just enjoying life on their roofs or having a lot of these makeshift outdoor restaurant structures

that were created during the time of the pandemic. It really, I think, forced people out of their walls, forced businesses out of their walls, and creates this openness and warmth and feeling that anybody can participate in a way that

spending time behind closed doors doesn't. So I feel like there was this pervasive warmth in Mexico City. Everything was for me, I felt like I was just living a very romantic time there because I was, you know, I was being inspired by the colors, by the trees, by the art, by the street art, by the food, by the smells. In terms of access,

access to access to quality art, food and whatnot. Like the streets provide so much of that. There's fantastic street food. There's great murals on so many buildings as well. You don't have to go to a high end restaurant, even though they have that too. You don't have to go to a high end art gallery or museum, even though they have some of the best art collections in the world as well in Mexico City. It's it's kind of out there in the open.

And as somebody who takes a lot of visual cues and tries to notice things, I just found it very stimulating and inspiring to be there and just sit and observe and see kind of what comes out of the woodwork. So a lot of good visual fodder, a lot of time spent reflecting and thinking about things

thinking about what it means to share more of my life more openly. I think seeing people live their life on the streets was a really good metaphor for that for me as well. All in all, I think it was a very, very compelling experience. And I am very excited to go back at some point and spend more time in the warmth of the city.

For our listeners who may be intrigued by the idea of slow living in a fast-paced city or just in general, what advice would you offer? How can others incorporate elements of slow living into their own lives? So I think

The first thing I would suggest is defining what slow living means for you personally. Again, for me, there are three tenets that I'm trying to live by and arrange my space to reflect, but it could look very different. It

and there could be different elements that stand out. And I think the best way to do that or what I found to be helpful for doing that is to start from a blank slate, completely simplify things, quiet yourself down and think about what comes up and resonates with you as being important, exciting, kind of non-negotiables for how you want to be spending your time and living your life.

Um, there's this great exercise by a design thinker named Debbie Millman, um, called, uh, I think designer life in 10 days. And it's, it's this exercise where you write down in great detail, what your ideal day, sorry, in 10 years, what your ideal day in 10 years looks like from how you feel, uh,

who you're with, what you're eating, what you're doing. And I've continued to revisit that exercise. And every time I do that, I realize the elements that I enjoy the most require me to have a slower pace, to have slow living as a concept in my life now. So starting with the answer,

kind of what your ideal day looks like in 10 years, doing that from a place of quietness and calmness and stillness, where you can really surface what is intrinsically important and exciting to you is a really great way to personalize what the notion of slow living means specifically for what you're interested in.

I would also say, I think there's a lot on Instagram right now. My algorithm knows me very well. That is that, that showcases how other people are, are living these slow living lifestyles. And Instagram is a very powerful tool, I think, to draw inspiration and understanding of how other people live without necessarily leaving our physical homes. I, I,

I love to travel and I will continue to, you know, try to travel as often as I can. But when I can't and when I can't go to places that are maybe harder to reach or that I don't have the time to build into or budget for, I can look to, you know, inspiration from other people as well and try to try to try to curate the aspects of of

of their lifestyles that, um, resonate most with kind of how I want to carry myself too. So there's a lot of inspiration, um, everywhere internally, um, a lot of examples of slow living externally that I think the internet has started to, um, uh, to, to create a bit of a trend around and surface as well. Um, but I think the, the most important thing is to, um,

One, just under understand if this is, you know, a phase of life or a period or a season that that you want to take on. Again, there are periods of life and sports and things that require us to have adrenaline or to, you know, be be

be in action. But for the most part, if this is kind of a period of life you're looking to move into, I'd recommend just really, really being deliberate and thinking about what it looks like for you and trying to distill it down to something simple, something easy to commit to and build into your day to day.

I love what you mentioned is like as Instagram can be something like you're inspiring and you can look at other people's living style and for inspiration, right? We can't just always on the road. We can't always just traveling where we have work to do. We have our lives, right? The times we cannot like go out there and internet as Instagram is a very good tool for us to looking for ideas and see how other people living. Absolutely.

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