“Take your time”
When I started this project, I was in a hurry. A hurry to get there, find a voice, tell something worthwhile. Two years of notebooks, readings and photos took me to a very different place, unexpected: “Take your time,” said that new voice inside me.
Today, taking one’s time is almost a provocation, a luxury reserved for those who have something to fall back on, cheek, audacity or courage, those for whom life has stopped, and all those who have decided to move to the outskirts of a system where living in peace is increasingly difficult. “Hurry, hurry, we’re late”, is what even children are used to hearing.
“Taking your time”, writes the philosopher Josep María Esquirol in “The Daily Breath”, “means to not rush, not run, not skip stages …; it means taking whatever time is needed for things, matters, projects, to mature.”
In the two interrupted years that I have spent on this personal project, investing quality time, and observing the everyday nature of days, became almost an obsession. Basically, I think I was looking for a different way of measuring the productivity that highlights the importance of the time it takes to understand something, to achieve something new, to create value.
With nature as my source of inspiration, “The Flowers of Time” is an essay of creative life in four seasons. Spring is an ode to imagination, Summer is a series of experiments on observation, Autumn an essay of creative life – closer to intention than interpretation – and Winter, an ode to all the rest in the form of interviews.
Join us!
If you want to participate, you can do so in different ways. With your mobile phone, sharing your findings or beautiful work on Instagram and Facebook or with the help of Summer and workshops organized in different cities. Any other idea? Just let us know!
About Belen Torregrosa
PHOTO: ANA VILA. DOHA, DECEMBER 2017.
The discovery of a wall in Milan in April 2009 that said “nothing is everything” awakened in Belen the desire to try to live doing what she most likes: looking for the beauty that abides within people, places, and certain projects.
Born in Denia, graduated in German Philology and trained in Coolhunting by the Future Concept Lab and in Storytelling by IDEO, Belen works as a freelance consultant in communication projects that seek to generate meaning, visibility and belonging in the lives of people.
At the crossroads between communication, education and creativity, Belen combines her strategic work with teaching and seminars. She has been an associate professor at the University of Navarre since 2011 and is a coach at the School of Industrial Organization (EOI), where she holds storytelling workshops for entrepreneurs while at the same time exploring the geography of her country.