For our generation, what is scarcest is perhaps not time but the ability to wait. Tea is a ritual for training that ability — it never speeds up because you want it to.
A cup of white tea takes at least 72 hours from fresh leaf to finished tea: 36 hours of withering, 12 hours of drying, 24 hours of resting. Try to hurry any one of those steps and the tea's vitality breaks. This is not conservatism in the craft; it is physics.
The same is true on the road. Waiting at four in the morning at Tongmu Pass for a batch of tea to leave the roaster, there is nothing you can do but stand and watch the fire — and that 'nothing you can do' is precisely the experience hardest to come by in a city.
So we keep making slow journeys — not the opposite of efficiency, but the depth of perception. Sit down and wait for a cup of tea, and you begin to notice the light outside the window changing.
If you would like to practise waiting, try something simple: buy a white tea, and when you brew the first infusion, force yourself to sit for a full five minutes before drinking. Five minutes is not long, but you will find that for the first two you were looking for your phone.