The joy of slowing down and revisiting your cultural gallery for the soul

January 2 2026

By Tony Cuthbertson

Most of us already carry an extraordinary cultural device in our pocket. Our phones give us access to writing, film, photography, music, long-form conversations, and ideas that could genuinely help us slow down and feel more grounded, if we were more deliberate about how we interacted with them.

The problem isn’t access. It’s how rarely we choose what fills that space. This is one place where a Shooglebox can be useful.

Image by Spencer Chow, Unsplash

One of the things a Shooglebox can be used for is creating a personal collection of things you like to read, watch, explore, or flick through now and then. Not things an algorithm predicts will keep you engaged, but things you already know you return to. In this context, it becomes a pocket-sized cultural space that exists for you, rather than a feed on a social platform that’s designed for engagement metrics.

A Shooglebox can hold all kinds of material. Articles you’ve saved to reread. Photographs or images that you never quite tire of. Thoughtful social posts that you want to come back to. Podcast episodes you want to save for later. Music clips, film scenes, old memes that still make you smile. Quotes you’ve copied down because they articulated something you hadn’t quite found the words for yourself.

What matters isn’t the format. It’s the relationship you have with it.

Making the space matters

There’s also something quietly powerful about the act of building this kind of space for yourself. 

Choosing what belongs in it takes a certain kind of attention. You have to notice what actually helps you feel calmer rather than distracted. You have to decide what deserves space, and what doesn’t. You have to resist the pull of whatever is newest, loudest, or most emotionally charged.

In that sense, a Shooglebox becomes something like a personal scrapbook. A collection of ‘go to’ things you’ve assembled with care, rather than stumbled across by accident. The process of making it forces you to slow down and reflect, and that in itself can be very grounding.

The importance of a pause

A recent article in The Sunday Times explored the growing body of research suggesting that spending time in art galleries can have a measurable calming effect on the body. Looking at art, it argued, doesn’t just lift our mood. It can lower stress, regulate the nervous system, and offer a kind of mental stillness that modern life rarely allows. Some researchers have even begun talking about culture as a form of therapy, not because it fixes anything, but because it slows us down in ways our bodies seem to recognise.

When you visit a great museum or art gallery there’s a difference in how you move and how you allow your attention to settle. You aren’t rushed. You aren’t pulled in ten directions at once. You decide what’s worth your time.

That freedom is part of what makes cultural spaces feel so different from most of our digital ones. In a gallery or exhibition, nothing is competing to be seen first. Nothing insists that you respond. You can skim past one thing, linger with another, or simply stand still for a while.

Shooglebox is built around two-sided cards, and that design choice is deliberate. On the front of each card, you place something simple and intriguing – an image, a phrase, a photo or a few words that catch your attention.

If you want to go further, you can turn the card over. On the back, you might find more images, a piece of writing, a short music clip, a video, a podcast, or something else entirely. The depth is there, but it waits. Nothing reveals itself unless you choose to look.

That small pause – the moment of deciding whether to go deeper or not – turns out to matter more than I’d perhaps appreciated. And when you contrast that with the way our phones usually behave, it is obvious how rare that sense of unpressured attention has become.  

A habit I return to each year

Of course, this isn’t about abandoning social media, or pretending that a phone can replace the experience of being in a gallery. But it is about crafting something that works for us – at a deeply personal level. 

Every year, around this time, I find myself taking stock. Not in the sense of New Year’s resolutions or grand plans, but in a quieter, more practical way. That’s why, at the start of each year, I return to my own personal Shooglebox. I sort it, top it up, move things around, and scan through what’s already there. Some things quietly fall away. Others, which I’d forgotten about, still do exactly what they’re supposed to do. The act of revisiting it is calming in itself, a reminder of what steadies me when everything else feels busy.

Spending time in an art gallery helps us not because it’s a wellness trend, but because it gives us permission to slow down and pay attention on our own terms. A Shooglebox simply borrows some of that logic and brings it into everyday digital life. A small, intentional space , which feels very different from a jam-packed social media feed.

I really enjoy my personal Shooglebox. I only drop into it every now and then. But I like knowing it’s there.