There is a wall in my neighbourhood that has been being built for three years. I pass it most mornings. For the first year I thought it would be finished soon; for the second year I stopped thinking about it; for the third year I began to find it instructive.

The wall is being built by one man, who works alone, and only on certain days. He is methodical. He does not appear to be in a hurry. The wall is, I would estimate, about sixty percent complete. It will probably be finished by the time anyone reads this, which makes my point for me.

I have been thinking about what it means to build something slowly. Not reluctantly, not badly — slowly, as a considered posture. As a form of respect for the thing being made.

Most of what I have built quickly has needed to be rebuilt. This is not a universal truth, but it is close enough to one that I have stopped treating it as coincidence. Speed, I have found, is mostly a way of deferring the harder questions — what is this for, what should it actually do, what am I not seeing yet. Fast work answers these questions badly and early; slow work gives them time to clarify.

This is not an argument for slowness as such. Slowness can be a form of avoidance. The wall-builder is not avoiding; he is present to the wall on the days he works on it in a way that I think would not be possible if he were trying to finish it in a week.

The fastest I have ever built something was a website I made in an afternoon. It solved a specific problem for a specific person. I was pleased with it. I have not thought about it since.

The slowest thing I have built is a body of understanding about a subject I care about, which has taken years and is not finished and will probably not be finished. I think about it most days.

I am not claiming the slow thing is better than the fast thing; they were different things, made for different purposes. But I notice that I think about one of them and not the other, and that seems like information.

Foundations are slow by nature. You cannot rush the setting of concrete, the curing of mortar, the compaction of earth. The materials require time and there is no shortcut. What you can do is skip the foundation and build quickly on whatever is already there — and sometimes this works, and sometimes you come back three years later to find something that needs to be entirely rebuilt.

The man building the wall is laying a proper foundation. I have watched him level and re-level, reject stones that are wrong for their position, stand back and look for longer than seems necessary. He is making something that will be there in thirty years. He knows this. It changes how he works.

I am writing this essay slowly. I wrote a first version in an afternoon and it was thin and certain. I have been rewriting it, on and off, for several months. It has become less certain and, I hope, more true.

The foundation of a piece of writing is not the first paragraph, though that is where most revision starts. The foundation is the question being held. If the question is wrong, everything built on it will need to come down.

The question I have been holding is: what changes when you remove the pressure of speed?

I have not finished answering it. I suspect the answer is: most things, eventually.