Hi friends, I’m Michelle from Opting Out, based in Brighton, UK. Here I share regular posts on slow living, rest, and opting out of burnout culture, plus my weekly Weekend Mood Board of what’s currently inspiring me. Paid subscribers also get access to the Slow Reading Group (we’re currently reading “Rest is Resistance”), live Co-Resting sessions, yoga nidra audios and pre-recorded full-length restorative and yin yoga classes.
It’s my dream to create a community of misfits, questioners and resters. Are you in? ✨
Our new book for the next two months is The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating — a tender, meditative memoir that sits somewhere between natural history and a love letter to stillness. It’s a heart-opening reflection on illness, rest, and our delicate connection to the living world.
I chose this book because it’s a quiet masterclass in slowing down and taking notice — not as an ideal or a lifestyle trend, but as something life sometimes asks of us.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey became bedridden with a mitochondrial illness that left her unable to sit up in bed for more than a few minutes at a time. One day, a friend brought her some field violets in a pot, hoping to bring a little of the outside world indoors. Nestled among the leaves was a small woodland snail. “I thought you might enjoy it,” her friend said.
And so begins this unlikely companionship: a woman and a snail, sharing space, time, and silence.
Bailey’s early descriptions of the snail emerging from its new home are full of awe. Her observations, both tender and precise, reveal how much there is to see when movement is no longer possible:
“From where I lay, all of life was out of reach.”
That line took me straight back to my own recovery from major pelvic surgery a few years ago - those long, slow days spent on a makeshift bed on the sofa, watching the world from my window. I watched fledgling seagulls on the roof opposite, tracing their clumsy flights, learning patience in their rhythm.
Bailey writes of waking in the night and hearing, in the stillness, the almost imperceptible munching of the snail eating. That moment — that deep, embodied listening — feels like the essence of rest itself.
She draws quiet parallels between her own displacement through illness and the snail’s uprooting from its woodland home. In their shared stillness, both become teachers in surrender, in noticing, in the radical act of being “useless.”
“The velocity of the ill, however, is like that of the snail.” – Emily Dickinson
Through the snail, Bailey discovers what happens when we fall out of step with the speed of the world. Her attention shifts from the abstract to the granular — to mushrooms, to dew, to the rhythm of another creature’s life.
I was especially moved by her reflections on time. In illness, the clock both drags and disappears. Some hours felt painfully slow; others slipped away unnoticed while she was immersed in the snail’s world:
“We are all hostages of time.”
When she considers naming the snail, she decides against it, human names feel too heavy, too directional. Instead, she allows the creature its mystery.
And perhaps my favourite line in the book comes when she notices how much steadier and wiser the snail’s energy seems compared to that of her human visitors:
“It was as if they didn’t know what to do with their energy. They were so careless with it.”
That line lingers. It makes me think of how we scatter our own energy, our attention, our life force, without care or reverence.
And then, of course, there’s the snail’s shell: the ever-present home it carries, winding in perfect proportion. Reading Bailey’s description, I found myself asking: what makes me feel at home in my own body?
🌀 Questions for Contemplation and Discussion
Was there ever a time when rest or slowness was imposed upon you — through illness, loss, or something beyond your control? How did your relationship to the natural world shift during that time?
What might you hear if you allowed yourself a long period of true silence? Have you ever tried?
In what ways are you careless with your energy? How might you better conserve or direct it?
Who are your teachers of rest, human or otherwise?
In what ways are you a hostage of time? What could change that relationship?
What helps you feel “at home” — in your body, your space, your life?