OGUNQUIT, Maine – The trees are still, the sea calm. The other moment I saw a blue jay, and then a cardinal, and they looked as if they were posing for Roger Tory Peterson. No need to hurry on to that next branch. I think that pillowy cloud hanging over the buoy must be stuck, or stubborn maybe. It’s been there, stalled or maybe just stalling, for perhaps an hour. On very hot summer’s days, even the waves unfurl slowly. The ocean knows: You can’t move too quickly on a day like this.

So it’s a perfect morning for a conversation about slowness. This slowness business is a worldwide movement, and I am seeking to become what Thomas Paine, in an entirely different context, might have called a summertime soldier. I’m on vacation. I’m trying to slow down. I’m making some progress. I haven’t called the office in a full hour now.

In our hurried hearts, we know we need to slow down. We need to cook our food more slowly, and to eat it more slowly, and to walk more slowly, and to think more slowly and to talk more slowly. This sermon is brought to you by the fastest eater, the quickest walker, and the biggest mumbler in the office. When I read “In Praise of Slowness,” Carl Honore’s mind-altering prescription for challenging the cult of speed, I skimmed it in less than an hour. Bad sign, I know. Then again, I’m the guy who’s always asking why, in our newspaper, we have to wait for Wednesday for a story that really would have been more timely on Tuesday.

So I am trying to think of this vacation as a self-help program: Get up slowly. Don’t wolf down your breakfast. (There is no danger whatsoever that anyone else at the table is going to take the remaining blueberry doughnut.) Take a slow walk. Notice the way, in Maine, even the quietest breeze possesses a sound, and not only when it pushes the leaves around on the trees. Watch how your daughter, the 13-year-old who in the city thinks she is so worldly, nonetheless remembers how to make a castle in the sand and takes a pirate’s stolen joy in burying, maybe for the last time in her life, the treasure of her mom’s feet. Notice, in the special light that comes to the shore when everyone else is at supper, how that young woman you married 27 years ago looks even more lovely right now, in the gloaming pink that hangs around a near-empty beach before September comes.

Honore is a Canadian, which may be why he is so wise, and he opens his book with a remark, 98 years old, from William Dean Howells: “People are born and married, and live and die, in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it.” We do hurry a lot. And the only way to understand just how we hurry is to stop doing so, if only on vacation.

Because the hurrying is pervasive. One of Mozart’s most famous piano sonatas, the one in C major, very likely should take 22 minutes. We’re accustomed, now, to hearing it in 14 minutes. Not long ago we rented the video version of “My Fair Lady,” which I loved as a boy, way back in the 20th century; in the 21st century it seemed so slow that we could hardly bear to watch it. That gave me a great sadness.

The culture of speed is now subliminal. A lobster boat just moved into partial view, and a very powerful force inside me wants it to hurry along so that it won’t be hidden behind the oak tree on the right, not realizing until it is too late that if the boat moves quickly it will more swiftly disappear behind the pine tree on the left. (There are a lot of obstructed views in life, which is why we sometimes see so little of what is in front of us.) Same with that sailboat out there, only now catching the easterly breeze. It will be gone in an instant, and I’ll be left here on the deck hurrying to finish my column so I can slow down some more.

So what, after all this, have we been doing on vacation? Sometimes there’s a game of gin in the background, and every day there has been a stroll, and the summer fruit seems so sweet (is there any feeling quite as beautiful as the tongue-tingle produced by a plum in summertime?). The ocean feels so alive, and the cares that, only a day or so ago, seemed so big are receding, ever so slowly, a lot like that very same sailboat, the one that now has moved so far that, in the haze of August, I can barely see its outline, it being no more than a smudge between the buoy and the horizon.

Clinically that is known as depth perception. Morally it is known as perspective.

So is this: Soon September will be here, and there will be school and next year’s budget and the oncoming gloom of winter to worry about. Let’s not hurry on to any of that. Here on the shore, that means there will be, as Mary Ellen Chase put it in “Windswept,” her 1941 novel about her native Maine, “days when the sea at dawn is the colour of thin milk and motionless except for the breaking of the long swells in frail white lace about the rocks, days when the sun is pale yellow and one can stare at it without the least sense of being blinded, when a haze fills the air and sails hung languid above the water.” (That is writing that is meant to be read slowly. It’s impolite not to.)

Mary Ellen Chase is right, and she is right, too, that then will come the chill that none can avoid, here in Maine or back at home. No, let’s not hurry. The frost will hurry after us quickly enough.