When I was a boy, I had a ride-on lawnmower with no blades. I’d wanted a ride-on lawnmower for years, ever since my brothers and I found and restored-to-life a John Deere we found in the garage of a rental house in rural France. (The elderly neighbour, after observing from behind her lace curtains, came over to our yard once we got it running, after days or weeks of tinkering, to accuse us of wasting gas joyriding it around the driveway.) So, when one turned up at the local Canadian second hand store for $50, I bought it, along with a big bottle of slimy green goo to put into the flat tires to make them leak more slowly. Once I got it running, I spray-painted orange highlights that were widely regarded as an aesthetic disaster, and rode it gleefully around the field.

Not only were the blades not in use: they didn’t even work. Mathilde would not approve.

This machine had two speeds, labelled with a tortoise icon, and a hare icon. There may have been gradations between them, but what I liked to do was to putz along contemplatively in a cloud of fumes on tortoise mode, and then — with a dramatic flourish, as if I was a race car driver coming out of a brakestand — slam the lever full-ahead.

For a moment, nothing would happen. Then the engine would seem to lose power — anticlimax — before coughing and spluttering at the new fuel/air mixture, roaring to life at a new pitch, and accelerating with sufficient vigour to throw me back in my seat with a pleasant whiplash-like effect, and render bumps and potholes thrilling, fenceposts perilous, hearing useless, and grin enormous.

Today I am in tortoise mode.

I am writing this in a notebook, with a fountain pen^[1] that clogs and must be shaken, while drinking tea and listening to Mozart. Each word arrives slowly, between moments staring out the window at the fir tree blowing in the wind, trying to find the right way to put it.

The words do not pour out of me: they are wrung out one by one. When I surface, I can feel my face scrunched into a 5th-grader’s look of tongue-out concentration.

This might seem like a waste of effort. Why deliberately slow down the process?

(See this footnote for an 800-word analogy about brewing tea →: ^[2] )

Students learn better when they take notes by hand, because they have to summarize to keep up. When I write longhand, I have to mull over what I’m trying to say, and distil it into as few pen strokes as possible, rather than putting it down the way it first comes to mind.

For the past three days I’ve been attempting to get into Hare mode. It’s just not working. Modes have momentum, and inertia. And there’s a whiff of the old bootstrap paradox. Hare mode is both caused by, and causes, its correlates: early mornings, sleep deprivation, talking loud and fast, socializing, high-energy music, drinking too much coffee.

My physiotherapist told me to lean forward when I run, so that I am continuously falling and catching myself.

This is what Hare mode feels like.

Hare mode is like a noisy bar. Tortoise mode is a library. Both have their function; and what one encourages is impossible at the other.

Switching modes is a bit like throwing the throttle lever forward on my ride-on mower. One applies gas and air to the engine, and waits.

Right now, I’m somewhere between the “total loss of power” and “engine coughing and spluttering” phases. Any minute, I expect to be thrown back in my seat.

It might seem that Hare mode, as the higher-energy state, would be harder to transition to. But— it isn’t?

This essay is the result of a deliberate and effortful transition to Tortoise mode.

My last essay went somewhat viral and my server went down from the traffic. Our email list, built over a decade of blogging, doubled in a month. At the same time, I landed a big contract, got complimentary emails from people with their own Wikipedia articles, broke my long distance running record, and had music industry showcases and consultations. In my own small way, I felt like a big shot.

It had gotten to the point where I was glued to my stats — are people talking about me on the internet?! No? Well, what about now? — and sharing my successes with a frequency that was getting braggy.

I would wake up in the night and refresh Grafna to make sure my site wasn’t down, and that the CPU wasn’t throttled, or system load increasing suspiciously (there seemed to be a memory leak somewhere, and like the consummate professional that I am, I would just reboot the server when it started acting up, because that was more reliable than trying to do surgery while it was under load).

It was Sunday morning. I used to take an offline day once a week. Somehow, the habit had slipped.

I felt like spending another day in front of my huge monitor being awesome.

But I’d noticed success begat a manic energy that could easily become addictive and self-perpetuating. Unchecked, it was a feedback loop: the flywheel of activity would beget more success, and more activity, and more stress.

It had been fun, and fulfilling. I sat down to reply to emails, and after an hour, discovered that I had lost ground. I used exclamation marks, and it felt sincere. I learned a lot.

But did I want to live like that? No. I know people who live like that, and the trade-offs don’t seem worth it.

So I forced myself to take a break. I scaled down the server so it would stop charging me overage, and shut down my computer.

My “success”, such as it was, was not the result of gawking at Grafna dashboards, rapid-fire emailing, and tailing server logs.

No. That essay was born of tedium, contemplation, and long discussions of dishwasher pump repair held beside a crackling wood fire in a house with no indoor toilet.

The previous essay that made the HackerNews frontpage was written, meditatively, in a tiny rain-soaked pocket notebook, over the course of multiple muddy meandering bike rides through the city.

My first three works of fiction to be published in magazines were written (1) in a notebook at a coffeeshop open mic, and then in the same notebook with my feet on my desk, or (2, 3) on a donated 75-year-old typewriter, while sitting cross-legged on a rock outside my tent.

It’s not that I didn’t write on my computer; I often did. It just wasn’t as good.

I don’t know if the process qualifies as “slow productivity”, but it’s definitely slow.

I think of this oscillation between living in the slow lane and the fast lane as akin to running a wood stove without burning down the house.

If you run an old woodstove wide-open for too long, you’re liable to burn up the firebrick inside, and quite possibly set the wood panelling smoking.

But if you keep a woodstove damped down all the time, soot builds up in the chimney, and eventually you get a chimney fire.

A feature of my childhood was occasionally getting the stove good and roaring, till the cook surface began to glow, to blow the soot out. (Before my time, the soot in the chimney had caught fire once or twice; this was a tradition born of experience.)

It seems there is a parallel between woodstoves and human beings. ^[3]

So far, I’ve mostly been talking about tortoise mode, as if it was the good mode that we need more of. But it takes both modes to live life well. I don’t think the parable of the tortoise and the hare is the whole truth. We’re not the tortoise or the hare: we are the tortoise and the hare. The question is which champion to bring out for which race.

The problem with tortoise mode is that it is very slow and resource-intensive. It’s hard to live exclusively in tortoise mode and feel fulfilled and effective.

So let’s talk about Hare mode. What is it, and what is it good for?

If tortoise mode is steering, hare mode is throttle. If tortoise mode is being, hare mode is doing. Hare mode executes the tortoise mode vision. ^[4]

Tortoise mode isn’t great for getting anything non-contemplative done. For every monk who meditates and teaches at a retreat centre, there are usually multiple administrators scurrying around, taking care of the arrangements. Neither role would exist without the other.

Once again, I have made hare mode seem less cool. But I think the mode I’m in colours my outlook. And this is tortoise mode talking, sunlight streaming in, Bach on the stereo, wool sweater, weak Heicha sipped from thrift store bone china.

Ask the guy in the too-tight tee about Hare mode, and the answer, if you can hear it over the opening riff of Kansas’ Carry on Wayward Son, will be quite different.

Since I’m not that guy, and indeed, scarcely know him, let’s talk about the failure modes of hare mode. (The failure modes of tortoise are boring: sluggishness, hibernation, getting behind, reacting so slowly that it’s no longer relevant.)

I live beside an old seaside highway. At night, at around 2AM, when there’s no traffic and the bars empty out, this scenic old 2-lane highway transmogrifies into an illicit racetrack. The Mustangs come out to play, and Pontiac Firebirds with V8 engines herniated through the hood deposit rubber on the pavement and smoke in the air.

For some reason, my town suffers from an infestation of Ford GT Mustangs. It’s as if there were a stud farm breeding the things. My hypothesis is that there are a lot of well-off people with poor taste, and the Mustang is the cheapest expensive car on the market. The noise per dollar of the machine is the best bargain this side of jackhammers and dynamite.

When you hear the muscle cars tearing down the strip in the middle of the night, and listen to the Doppler effect of each roaring engine and set of tuned pipes — or, as the case may be, deliberately untuned pipes — one imagines they must be going fast enough to mow down the row of small poplars and take out a whole city block if they lost control. It seems a miracle we don’t find wreckage on Sunday morning.

The other day I was coming home from town on my bicycle, and heard the throaty, many-cylindered roar of a Mustang approaching from ahead. I pulled farther from the road, comforted that there was a sturdy stoplight post between me and the oncoming beast, and peered around the corner ahead, expecting it to shoot into view being driven at reckless speed, possibly on fire with James Bond clinging to the trunk and a squad of police cars in pursuit. The noise of the oncoming car kept getting louder, but it never came into view. Then suddenly I spotted it. It was right in front of me, in the congestion at the stop light, hardly moving at all.

The moral of the story: the loudest car isn’t necessarily the fastest. Sometimes the bark is worse than the bite.

I think there’s a parallel among intellectuals. The best thinkers often seem to be the Toyota Corolla style; the Lamborghini-brains never seem to really get anywhere; they are too busy being impressed by all the noise they are making.

I don’t mean to knock Mustangs, or sports car people. The film Ford v Ferrari (2019) gave me a sense of how car racing could be an almost transcendent art. And I met a kind museum curator and palæontologist whose son built out a custom 1980 Firebird for him when he was very ill, as a get-well wish, and who admitted to smoking the pavement on my very street during an unauthorized, unorganized race. The person in the driver’s seat of a classic jerk-mobile might be anything but. They might be a softspoken cancer survivor, cradled in a ~300hp love letter, finding joy on borrowed time.

Context also matters. A GT40 could smoke a Ferrari on the track. But in bad traffic, I could probably beat a Mustang into town on my 50-year-old Peugeot road bike.

Hare mode is about getting from A to B without farting around or wasting time. It isn’t about the route taken, or the equipment used. Spoilers are optional.

Sometimes, even with Hare mode — especially with Hare mode — going smart is more important than going fast. Look for paper walls and chalk on the floor ^[5]. Embrace that hacker mindset and find function from form. Use the pedestrian-controlled crosswalks.

Nature figured this out billions of years ago. Each season, microscopic or macroscopic, creates the conditions for the next. So it is with life at all scales. Why would I be the exception?

I feel a mischievous hankering to hop on my bicycle and go race some Mustangs.