Cooking a Pot of Beef Stew: Navigating Through Difficult Times Through Slow Philosophy

The Slow Movement offers feminist scholars permission to inhabit multiple identities and recognizes the inherent value of care work as work. Against an intimate living backdrop of pancreatic cancer, COVID-19, and overwork, I practice Slow scholarship by embodied caring for three elders while experiencing powerful anxiety. Identifying as a daughter, mother, carer, student, friend, leader, and scholar, I look to a variety of wisdom sources outside universal concepts of value and time to ground myself in the present. Zen, Taoism, and existentialism suggest staying with anxiety as a viable means to live in an uncomfortable present.