Choosing the slow lane

The weekly micro-decorating newsletter * Issue 11 of 13, SS23 *
Subscribe free *

Maybe it's an impolite question, but I'll ask it anyway: Is there anything about the pandemic years behind us you actually enjoyed? I have an answer that might surprise you: those directional floor stickers everywhere.

For a while, all of downtown felt like an elaborate board game, colourful markers telling us where to go with our next move. The coercive aspect seemed less annoying when reinterpreted as a form of play.

With those stickers gone, I feel a new sense of freedom, at times hardly believing that I can walk wherever I want. When I get to a subway platform's Designated Waiting Area, nostalgia kicks in:

The scuffed speech balloon touting safety reminds me of a world beneath our feet offering near-constant guidance. It's not so long ago.

Let's see the blankness of city floors as an invitation. Now-liberated pedestrians, let's be more conscious of how and where we travel. The stairs or the escalator? The shortcut or the scenic route? A saunter or a sprint? These small design decisions shape the day.

In grocery stores, we face the divide between self-checkouts and the human-powered kind – and I've learned the latter is better for me. There in the slow lane, roses lean forward as if begging to be smelled:

And magazines cry out with the doings of celebrities:

After exposure to fiery divorces and miracle births and crushing illnesses, putting groceries onto a simple rubber conveyer belt is weirdly comforting. It's a momentary still life on an imagined kitchen counter. Then the clerk presses the button that moves the whole thing along. And then: a face-to-face encounter, masks gone but plexiglass remaining, a loosely scripted conversation, brief eye contact, maybe the slightest hint of flirting.

In the meantime, a chorus of synthetic overlapping voices chirps at the other end of the store: "Thank you for using self checkout!" I've tried using that area, and even though it's faster, it's not for me. It feels too robotic. And I miss peeking at the groceries of the customers in front of me and behind me, politely separated by plastic bars. They're still lifes too, fascinating for including items that never make it to my own shopping cart.

That fork in the road between self checkout and human checkout is just one of the many splits we navigate in a day. Why not take time to consider them all and hold fast to our power as pedestrians?

Elsewhere

It's a less stylish universe without Jane Birkin in it. The photos in this article say it all.

Thank you for reading.