The usual advice applies: avoid social media (to the extent that you can), watch less crap (to the extent that you can), turn your smartphone off or leave it at home when you go out (to the extent that you can). (It takes training to slow down.)

I agree with the advice, but here I’m choosing another path: not what you shouldn’t do or what you should stop doing, but what you might like to do instead, in pleasure, in wonderment and gratitude.

Go to the same art show multiple times. Maybe there’s a free museum not far from where you live. Or buy a pass to a good museum and pop in for half an hour two or three times a week for the duration of a temporary exhibit or to see the main collection. Many brief visits in sequence give you the feeling of a sustained commitment. It’s a constructive balance between fast (minutes) and slow (weeks and months).

No easy access to a museum or art gallery? Frequent a square, a park, a university campus, an arboretum, a monument, a plaza. The word “plaza” comes from an old root meaning “to spread.” Pace around the statue in the middle of the plaza, walking and looking, looking and thinking, thinking and feeling. You don’t need to justify your walking with health arguments (cardiology, neurology, psychopathology). You walk because you love to walk. The issue is settled. Go back to the plaza tomorrow, and the day after, and most days.

Read the same book multiple times. Read it intermittently: eight or ten pages today, a few tomorrow. Put it down for a week and keep in mind what you were reading about. Or put it down and forget what the book was about, and delight in re-discovering it when you pick it up afresh later on. How many books are there in the world? The Library of Congress in the US holds about 20 million books. Read a thousand books a year, and it’ll take you 20,000 years to read them all. By then another billion books will have been published. You might as well relax and have a close reading of just a handful of books in your lifetime, since it’s impossible to put a dent in the billionarity, to coin a word.

I’ve read some of the short stories by Jorge Luis Borges sixty or seventy times. It’s better than being distracted by sixty or seventy poorly digested books, or watching sixty or seventy video clips that diminish your intellectual acumen—I mean, video clips that make you dumb. And, yes, I watch dumb crap, too. Curtailing crap by 10% counts as a victory. 1% is also a victory.

Repetitive tasks that seem banal hide interesting possibilities. Take peeling carrots as an example. Given the choice between buying already-peeled carrots and unpeeled ones, go for those rough-skinned friendly objects who talk to you and who give you instructions (“Slow down, Pedro, you move too fast”) and whisper sweet nothings (“Oh Pedro! I have no promises to keep!”). The pre-peeled carrots are trying to save you cooking time so that you can spend more time watching TikTok videos. Come to think of it, you might want to record yourself slowly peeling a carrot and post a looped, slo-mo version of it on TikTok. You’ll get lots of likes, even if no one watches the whole clip ’cos it takes too damn long and who has the time?

Engage in a steady manual activity again and again. It’s not the same as reading or going to an art show. Practicing a musical instrument is good. Drawing or knitting, excellent. Rubbing a cat’s head and spine, back and forth 20 million times: the best. Dog is fine. Parrot is fine. Stuffed toy is totally acceptable, and in some case preferable. It doesn’t count if you do it for two minutes once a month. No. The cat sits on your lap or nests against your face, and you do nothing but squeeze its head and spine and jaw—without watching TV at the same time, for instance. You and the cat, you and the stuffed toy, you and your thoughts and feelings, you and your brain quitting the Autobahn and staying put, you and your soul getting to make the morning last.