My “European lifestyle” started when I changed how I walk

When my feet slowed, my mind did too

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NEWS: This coming Thursday 5th June, I’ll be participating in a Substack live with my good friend

Ali Hall

who owns the excellent publication

Life Without Children

We’ll be delving into a story I wrote for LWC called How Do You Grieve For Infertility When There Is Always Another Potential Route to Parenthood?

Knowing Ali’s excellent hosting skills, this will be a powerful discussion with topics relevant to everyone, not only people who can’t have kids. I’d love love love to have you join us. Click on the big purple button below to join at the time. A replay will be available at Life Without Children for anyone who can’t make it.

Date: Thursday 6th June

Time: 6pm UK-time (10am PST / 1pm EST / 7pm CET)

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Illustration courtesy of author. A man pausing to read posters on a Porto street

Living in London, I was hot and sweaty all the time, even when temperatures dropped below freezing.

I fast-walked everywhere. London pace, I called it.

Rush to the tube. Push my way on. Quick, I’m late. Run up the stairs. Walk fast to the office. Tut at the tourists. Always in a hurry, as if I could fast-walk my way to more.

More money, more time.

Then one day, I sold everything I owned and moved to Portugal via a three-year jaunt through Spain, Croatia, and Italy. European countries with a reputation for a slower pace of life.

It turns out, a slower pace also includes how people walk. And it was this I struggled with for the longest time. Even though it turns out to be incredibly important.

It’s not just the old people who saunter here in Portugal. Although saunter they do, shuffling up and down the narrow Porto pavements, barely big enough to fit one person let alone two.

It’s also the young mum slowly pushing the buggy down the cobbled streets, window shopping as she goes. It’s the group of kids, fresh out of school. It’s the young guy in a suit meandering towards a lunchtime beer and bifana pork sandwich.

Sometimes it’s me too. But old habits die hard.

For the first six months of living abroad, my home was the small Spanish city of Logroño. For months I would speed up and down my local walking path which also happened to be one of the most famous walking routes in the world, the Camino de Santiago.

I would puff past pilgrims and locals, the latter of whom would stare at me and my sweaty face with unapologetic, naked curiosity.

Yet I had nothing to rush to. After selling my business, there was no rat race. No promotion. No status-signalling. I no longer had to take life at a hurried pace.

But I was in a hurry. I was in a hurry to “live my best life.” To get started with my new career as a writer. To live in that quintessentially “European” way I’d been forever desperate for.

My mind raced, and my feet did too.

But locally, I stuck out.

One day, a friend of mine and I took a walk. She was Australian but had lived in Spain for many years. She watched me march off and shouted after me:

Charlie, what’s the rush? Slow down, this is Logroño! Nothing fast happens here and you’ll never fit into this city if you walk like that.

She was right. I’d never fit in living anywhere in typically slower-paced European countries with a walk like mine.

With a racing mind like mine.

But how could I stop? It was a habit of a lifetime. For the walk and the mind.

I don’t need to tell you how rushed we all are.

12 hour work days. Diaries filled with more activities than any reasonable human should engage in. Endless errands and chores.

We have less leisure time than ever. We are also primed for instant gratification.

Same-day deliveries. Dopamine culture. Count the claps, the likes, the comments.

Everything busy, all the time.

This isn’t relegated to countries like the US or UK, it’s creeping into those famous slower-paced places too. Spain’s leisure time shrank by 11% during the 2010s. I’ve got WhatsApp groups here in Portugal who will jibe, sending messages like “you’re on holiday?! It’s alright for some!”

The pressure of living a fast-paced modern life doesn’t disappear just because you live in Europe. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be better. That you can’t seek — and find — a calmer life in those famously slow-paced European countries.

On Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, slowing down is such a part of their life they have conceptual names for it. Like Fijaka — the sweetness of doing nothing. Or Pomalo — take it easy.

After Logroño, I spent half a year living on that Croatian coastline. Life became very simple. Every day, the same. A trip to the market. Writing in the local café. A late afternoon swim. An evening aperitif on the balcony.

7 Ways Croatians Smash out the Good, Simple Life (That You Can Adopt Too)

For the first time in nearly two decades, I slowed down. The pomalo way of life seeped into my very being. I saw enough people around me engaging in fijaka to permit me to engage with it too.

Habits began to break. My mind began to calm. My ambition lowered, happy as I was earning enough money for this simple, slow existence.

As my mind calmed down, my walking did too.

Gradually — almost without realising it — I heeded my Australian friend’s advice. Gradually, I started walking like a “European.”

Sometimes you don’t know how far you’ve come until you see who you used to be.

After three years of traveling, friends met my husband and me in Rome. Londonites we’ve known for years — we’ve pounded many a pavement with them, chatting away for hours as we walk.

But something had changed. We realised after a few hours that we couldn’t keep up with their pace. They marched on ahead as we ambled behind.

We laughed with them later that we’d barely spent time with them because we were always split into two factions. Them storming ahead, us lagging.

It was then I realised my pace truly had slowed. I also realised I was no longer irritated by the slow pace of people around me because I was one of them.

Returning to London earlier this year, I took the city not at London pace but at what I now call Porto pace. And it opened up the city like I never saw whilst I lived there.

I didn’t push my way onto the tube. I didn’t walk, head down, from one spot to another. I looked up. I looked around. And I was even tutted at by a Londoner.

For me, that tut was no longer a mark of shame but a badge of honour. A quintessentially British passive-aggressive reminder that I’ve changed. My walking pace has slowed. My mind races less.

And I’m a better person for it.

It’s a bit of a stereotype that Southern Europeans are slow walkers. After all, Madrid allegedly has the third fastest walkers in the world.

But that experiment had people walk up and down a stretch of unencumbered pavement. That’s not real life.

In real life, you meet someone you know and stop for a quick chat. You see a shop window with something interesting winking at you from behind the glass.

You stop by a local bar to peruse the menu. You pause to watch a murmuration of birds fill the sky at dusk. Or here in Porto, you can’t help but stop and stare at the azulejos, Portugal’s famous tiles.

These are arguably stereotypes in themselves, but they are ones I see play out every single day here in Portugal. They’re the ones I play out myself.

It’s not just about the pace you walk at, it’s about permitting yourself to notice what’s going on around you and to take the time to absorb those experiences.

And absorbing those experiences — you might call it living in the moment — doesn’t just help to slow down your pace, it also helps to calm a racing mind.

I needed that.

Something tells me you might need that too.

Change can happen and you can start it with your walk.