slow is not the opposite of progress

In the middle of nowhere—or perhaps the edge of somewhere—a donkey stands. Its hooves press into dust like punctuation marks in a sentence no one will ever read. The weight on its back, invisible yet crushing, feels eternal. It neither resents nor embraces it; it simply is.

The world spins faster now, its orbits tangled with the algorithms of desire. The donkey remains unmoved. Around it, voices rise in digital hymnals: Be faster, be smarter, be more. But the donkey only flicks its ears, stubborn in its refusal to care. Stubborn, yes—but is it really? Or does it merely understand what the rest have forgotten? That forward is a direction, not a destination.

Somewhere, a philosopher—half-drunk on metaphor, half-hoping for a revelation—calls the donkey a beast of burden. But the donkey carries more than the philosopher can imagine: the weight of discarded dreams, the history of long-forgotten roads, the quiet wisdom of saying no.

The Donkey Mindset, the philosopher writes on a napkin, “is the art of knowing when to carry the load and when to refuse to move.” The donkey, unmoved by this poetic epiphany, takes another step into the dust.

There is no audience for the donkey. No likes, no shares. Its pace mocks the infinite scroll. It doesn’t need to perform its struggle or justify its resistance. It is the anti-narrative, the quiet contradiction to a world obsessed with speed and spectacle.

But here’s the thing about donkeys: they carry everything. The forgotten grocery lists. The unsent love letters. The things we were too afraid to say, packed tight into invisible saddlebags. And yet, they move forward—not toward triumph, but simply because there’s a horizon.

And the philosopher, watching the donkey disappear, realizes too late that this stubborn beast understands what it means to live more fully than anyone shouting into the void.

“Slow,” the donkey whispers to no one, “is not the opposite of progress.”