A tree-dwelling mammal embodies my words of the year
Slow, strong, intentional
In the Costa Rican jungle in 2010, I bumped along a rutted dirt road in a jeep I shared with a honeymooning couple from England. The driver suddenly slammed on the brakes and thrust his index finger toward the tree canopy above us, pointing at a long, hairy, twisted…something.
“SLOTH!” he managed to both whisper and shout at the same time.
After its name had been uttered, the mass of tangled fur and limbs gradually came into focus. It was a female and her pup, who clung to her as they both hung upside down—pup to mother, mother to tree—from a high limb, staring curiously at us.
The female sloth then began to move in a kind of slow-motion ballet, gracefully reached her arm around behind her, and started scratching.
“Her BUM!” One of the honeymooners exclaimed, “Look! She’s scratching her BUM!”
She repeated this statement several times in her moment of nature-induced awe. I tried to stifle my giggles. Had she not seen a wild animal scratch its ass before?
To be fair, it was an intricately delicate procedure with those three long claws. Still, of all the marvelous things about this animal, the fact that it could scratch its rear end ranked rather low on my own list of awesome things about it.
An unfortunate name for an amazing creature
The first scientists who came to the jungle to “discover” species struggled to make sense of sloths. Projecting their western European worldview on the animals, they concluded that sloths were so lazy they would be unlikely to survive long in the wild, and named them after this perceived certitude of uselessness.1
Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins, a litany of how not to be that was codified in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century. Regardless of our religious affiliation, the seven deadly sins have found their way into most of our psyches, forming the foundation of what we believe it means to be “good”.
In her book, On Our Best Behavior,
unpacks each of the seven deadly sins to examine how women police themselves and each other in our quest to achieve the ever-elusive goodness.Loehnen looks at how living in fear of committing these “sins” denies us our humanity and our wellbeing. The antidote, she says, is to embrace these shall-nots in healthy ways. Loehnen writes:
Accepting sloth as essential, we can demand support, embrace rest, and reserve our strength for the worthiest work.
If this does not describe the natural history of a sloth, I don’t know what does.
Searching for information about sloths, the term “lazy” appears frequently, in an unfortunate projection of humans’ productivity culture onto a creature that has an entirely different natural history strategy than we do.
Natural history of a sloth
Sloths have an incredibly slow metabolism—it can take them 2 weeks to digest a meal—so in order to preserve as much energy as possible, they sleep up to 20 hours per day and move very, very slowly.
What they lack in speed sloths make up for in strength. The force of their grip is twice that of a human’s, they are overall 3x stronger than us, and they can pull more than 100% of their body weight up with only one arm.
If you’ve ever lifted weights properly, you know that slow and steady is the name of the game for the best results.
Strong, slow, intentional
Burnt-out people aren’t equipped to serve a burning planet.
Susanne Moser in the essay collection, All We Can Save
After a major injury in 2022, I lost a lot of physical strength. Because my main focus was on pain management, I’ve since resumed many, but not all, of my previous physical activities. For example, I cannot yet go for a run. As I rebuild strength, I want it to build lastingly, like a sloth: through slow, intentional work.
The times when I’ve been physically strongest were also accompanied by an extra side of mental toughness. In the coming year I will be stretching and strengthening my comfort zone: with what I write about, the content I put into the world, and the conversations I’m willing to have.
Quality over quantity
I used to do everything, all at once, which meant I did a lot of things, modestly well.
Imagine if I only did a few.
This concept is hardly novel. Productivity experts have been talking about it for some time. Just take the pomodoro method, Cal Newport’s Deep Work, and pretty much anything Tim Ferriss or Naval Ravikant ever said: turn down the noise and do the most important things, well.
In On Our Best Behavior, Loehnen writes:
We need to put aside some of the busywork, the perfectionistic minutiae that are not worthy of our care, and take up the Work, the battle against entropy like the undertow of our lives. Apathy, not sloth, would be the more appropriate “sin”, the one against which we should collectively rail.
There is hope in seeing a more effective, integrated, whole version of ourselves on the other side of incremental, consistent change.
I’d love to hear:
Do you have words or intentions guiding you for the coming year? If so, what are they?
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This reminds me a lot of “junk DNA”, the term scientists gave to the DNA they hadn’t (yet) figured out the utility for. This is rapidly changing as the “junk” is discovered to be more and more useful. A scientist’s job is to be curious, and willing to be surprised; not dismissive of things that don’t match their existing worldview.