I'm Ada Limone and this is The Slowdown.

This last year, my husband and I started watching the British television show The Detectorists.

It's a quiet, understated comedy where nothing much happens.

But we both fell deeply in love with the characters, the landscape, and how each time the two

leads went out with their metal detectors to search for something unnamable, historical,

lost inside years of earth, there was a meditative optimism.

This time we might find something.

This time the world might open up and show us its treasures.

The show reminded me a little of writing poetry.

It's that idea that if we look long and hard enough at something, if we look for something,

if we are patient and observant and thorough with our looking, we might find some new

worth.

It's true of reading at times too.

Oh, it used to be so hard for me to pay attention to books when I was younger.

I was always so distracted by the world.

I had an old friend who used to walk down the streets of Provincetown Cape Cod reading

a novel.

I never knew how he did it without falling or getting hit by a stray truck or even just

feeling too distanced from the landscape that he might have the urge to throw the novel

into the sea just so he could actually look at the sea.

But his concentration was impressive.

It was something I ambied.

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