Marble man-parts and more

Hey ,

I was in Milan for Design Week last week.

Honestly, it was pretty horrifying – at times I felt like standing in the middle of a piazza and yelling "You do know there's a climate crisis going on, right?!"

I saw a penis made from marble.

A designer actually looked around, saw everything going on in the world at the moment, and decided to apply his (or her, but I'm guessing....) talent, time and effort to extracting stone from the earth and shaping it into an oversized phallus.

I also saw beautiful, ingenious, and important work – craft that could genuinely save the world.

And I wanted to share that with you – so I got up early and pounded the pavements, did an average of 20,000 steps a day, and tried to share live Instagram updates as I went – twice daily round-ups to show you what I was seeing, as I was seeing it.

But I soon realised that my approach was out of alignment with what I wanted to share.

I wanted to show you work that was slow, considered and intentional.

And I was trying to share it in a way that felt urgent, superficial and exhausting.

I was comparing my efforts with other journalists' feeds that were already filled with daily updates – and feeling like I was coming up short.

So I stopped.

I took a breath and I changed my mind.

I decided to share one thing at a time, and to do so at my own pace – to give myself the time to explore and explain the work properly – to share it in a way that felt as slow, considered and intentional as the work I wanted to share.

Because environmentalism is not just about outcomes, it is also about how we get there.

It is more about being than doing. So I decided to "be" differently.

Follow @katietreggiden.1 for my super slow Milan updates (no marble man parts, I promise!) – and hit reply and tell me about how you plan to slow down this week too.