I used to think slowing down was something you did when you’d earned it. A reward at the end of a long project, or a week you’d blocked in the calendar six months in advance. Something that happened to you, not something you did deliberately.
It took picking up a brush to understand that it’s actually something you practise. Like any other skill.
What watercolour teaches you that strategy doesn’t
In strategy work, you build towards certainty. You gather data, you test hypotheses, you refine until the answer feels solid enough to present to a room full of sceptical people. Uncertainty is the problem. Clarity is the goal.
Watercolour works in exactly the opposite direction.
You put paint on paper and it does something you didn’t expect. The water moves the pigment somewhere you didn’t plan. A wash you thought would be soft comes out dark and saturated. And here’s the thing — you can’t undo it. Watercolour doesn’t have a ctrl+Z. You have to work with what’s there.
At first, this drove me quietly mad. I kept trying to fix things. To correct. To bring it back to what I’d intended.
Then at some point — I’m not sure exactly when — I stopped trying to fix it and started trying to see it. What is this, actually? What does it want to be?
That shift is harder to describe than it sounds. But it changed how I painted. And slowly, it changed how I worked.
The small things you stop noticing
When you paint from observation — a face, a street corner, a tree in a specific kind of light — you have to look properly. Not the way you look at your phone. The way you look when you’re genuinely trying to understand something.
You notice that the shadow under a jaw is never one colour. That the space between two buildings has its own particular weight. That a person sitting still is actually never quite still.
These are small things. They don’t matter in any consequential sense. But the practice of noticing them — of being the kind of person who looks closely at the world rather than through it — that turns out to matter quite a lot.
I think it makes me better at the work I’m paid to do. I’m less certain about this than I used to be about most things. But I think it’s true.
What I’d say to someone who thinks they’re too busy
You probably are too busy. That’s not the issue.
The issue is what you’re doing with the small pockets of time that already exist — the twenty minutes before the day starts, the hour you spend scrolling after dinner, the commute you’ve turned into a podcast backlog.
I’m not suggesting painting specifically. I’m suggesting finding something that requires your full attention and gives you nothing useful in return. Something where the point is the doing, not the having-done.
It’s harder than it sounds. We’re not well-trained for it.
But it’s worth the effort. Not because it’ll make you more productive — though it might — but because it’ll remind you what it feels like to be genuinely present somewhere.
That, I’ve found, is rarer and more valuable than almost anything else.