In Praise of Slow

IN PRAISE OF SLOW

HOW A WORLDWIDE MOVEMENT IS CHALLENGING THE CULT OF SPEED

CARL HONORE

ORION           2004

 

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

Gandhi

 

Introduction: The Age of Rage

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.

William Dean Howells, 1907

• In 1982 Larry Dossey an American physician, coined the term ‘time sickness’ to describe the obsessive belief that time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up.
• These days the whole world is time-sick. We all belong to the same cult of speed. I began to grapple with the questions that lie at the heart of this book: Why are we always in such a rush? What is the cure for time-sickness? Is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down?
• In these early years of the 21^st century, everything and everyone is under pressure to go faster. We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small to one in which the fast eat the slow. We have developed an inner psychology of speed, of saving time and maximizing efficiency.
• The time has come to challenge our obsession with doing everything more quickly, but this book is not a declaration of war against speed because speed has helped to remake our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating.
• We exist to serve the economy. Long hours on the job are making us unproductive, error-prone, unhappy and ill. Doctors’ offices are swamped with people suffering from stress. Burnout is now found in people in their 30s or even their 20s.
• 60% of UK workers do not take their full vacation entitlement; one in five Americans go to work ill when they should be in bed. Overwork leaves less time and energy for exercise and makes us more likely to drink too much alcohol or reach for convenience foods.
• It is no coincidence that the fastest nations are also the fattest. Up to 1/3^rd of Americans and 1/5^th of Britons are clinically obese.
• Cocaine remains the booster of choice among white-collar professionals but amphetamines are catching up.
• One reason we need stimulants is that many of us are not sleeping enough; the average American gets 90 minutes less shut-eye than a century ago. Not getting enough sleep can damage the cardiovascular and immune systems, bring on diabetes and heart disease, and trigger indigestion, irritability and depression.
• Fatigue has played a part in some of the worst disasters of the modern era: Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Union Carbide and the space shuttle Challenge.
• Drowsiness causes more car crashes than alcohol. Many sports- and gym-related accidents are caused by pushing the body too hard, too fast, too soon. Even yoga is not immune.
• A life of hurry can become superficial; we rush, we skim the surface, and fail to make real connections with the world or other people. All the things that bind us together and make life worth living – community, family, friendship – thrive on time. Post-it stickers on the fridge door are now the main form of communication in many homes.
• The average working parent spends twice as long dealing with email as playing with children. All over the industrial world, children come home from school to empty houses where there is no one to listen to their stories, problems, triumphs or fears.
• Many children are now as busy as their parents, juggling diaries and with little time for messing around, playing without adult supervision and day-dreaming. Kids are less able to cope with sleep deprivation and stress that are the price of living hurried, hectic lives.
• If we carry on at this rate, the cult of speed can only get worse, forcing us to go faster still.
• Much has already been destroyed. We have forgotten to look forward to things; pay the bill and order a taxi while eating desert; leave sporting events early.
• Multi-tasking seems so clever, so efficient, so modern but usually means doing two things not very well.
• In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of slowing down and being alone with our thoughts.
• Boredom is a modern invention. Remove all stimulation, and we fidget, panic and look for something to do. Everyone is busy reading the paper, playing video games, listening to iPods, working on the laptop, yammering into mobile phones.
• With satellite feeds and 24-hour news channels, the electronic media is dominated by the person who can summon up a glib answer to any question.
• Instant gratification takes too long. Anyone or anything that steps in our way, that slows us down, that stops us from getting exactly what we want when we want it, becomes the enemy.
• Our obsession with going fast and saving time leads to road rage, air rage, shopping rage, relationship rage, office rage, vacation rage, gym rage. Thanks to speed, we live in the age of rage.
• After an incident at the airport in Rome I returned to London with a mission: to investigate the price of speed and the prospects for slowing down in a world obsessed with going faster and faster.
• We all moan about frenzied schedules, but is anybody actually doing anything about it? While the rest of the world roars on, a large and growing minority is choosing not to do everything at full-throttle. These rebels are doing the unthinkable – they are making room for slowness.
• Slower often means better – better health, better work, better business, better family life, better exercise, better cuisine and better sex.
• In this book Fast and Slow are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over quantity.
• Slow is about making real and meaningful connections – with people, culture, work, food, everything.
• The paradox is that Slow does not always mean slow. Performing a task in a Slow manner often yields faster results. Keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs, people are learning to remain Slow inside, even as they rush to meet a deadline. One aim of this book is to show how to do it.
• The Slow movement is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace, nor is it an attempt to drag the planet back to some pre-industrial utopia. The movement is made up of people like you and me who want to live better in a fast-paced, modern world.
• The Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and slow when slowness is called for.
• Carlo Petrini, the Italian founder of Slow Food, is dedicated to the notion that what we eat should be cultivated, cooked and consumed at a relaxed pace. The group’s manifesto is a call to arms against the cult of speed in all its forms: “Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Food.”
• “Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given context. We are fighting for the right to determine our own tempos.”
• This very simple philosophy is gaining ground: in the workplace; in the bedroom; in exercise regimes; and in alternative medicines – from herbalism to homeopathy – that take a gentle, holistic approach to the body. Cities are revamping the landscape to encourage people to drive less and walk more. Children are moving out of the fast lane as parents lighten schedules.
• In common with moderate anti-globalizers, Slow activists are not out to destroy the capitalist system. Rather, they seek to give it a human face – virtuous globalization.
• To get the full benefit from the Slow movement, we need to go further and rethink our approach to everything. A genuinely Slow world implies nothing less than a lifestyle revolution.
• Slow Food has given rise to spinoff groups. Under the Slow Cities banner, 60+ towns in Italy and beyond are striving to turn themselves into oases of calm. Bra is also the home of Slow Sex. A leading educator has launched a movement for ‘Slow Schooling’.
• My aim in this book is to introduce the Slow movement to a wider audience, to explain what it stands for, how it is evolving, what obstacles it faces and why it has something to offer us all.
• Like most people, I want to find a way to live better by striking a balance between fast and slow.

 

Chapter 1: Do Everything Faster

Chapter 2: Slow is Beautiful

Chapter 3: Food: Turning the Tables on Speed

Chapter 4: Cities: Blending Old and New

Chapter 5: Mind/Body: Mens Sana in Corpore Sano

Chapter 6: Medicine: Doctors and Patience

Chapter 7: Sex: A Lover with a Slow Hand

Chapter 8: Work: The Benefits of Working Less Hard

Chapter 9: Leisure: The Importance of Being at Rest

Chapter 10: Children: Raising an Unhurried Child

• Harry Lewis is Dean of the undergraduate school at Harvard. In early 2001, he attended a meeting at which students were invited to air their grievances about staff at the Ivy League university. One undergraduate kicked up a memorable fuss. He wanted to double major in Biology and English, and cram all the work into three, instead of the usual four, years.
• After the meeting, Lewis began to reflect on how the 21^st student has become a disciple of hurry. In the summer of 2001, the dean wrote an open letter to every first-year undergraduate at Harvard. It was an impassioned plea for a new approach to life on campus and beyond. It was also a neat précis of the ideas that lie at the heart of the Slow philosophy.
• The letter, which now goes out to Harvard freshmen every year, is entitled: Slow Down. Over seven pages, Lewis makes the case for getting more out of university – and life – by doing less. He urges students to think twice before racing through their degrees. It takes time to master a subject, he says, pointing out that top medical, law and business schools increasingly favour mature candidates with more to offer than an “abbreviated and intense undergraduate education.”
• Lewis warns against piling on too many extracurricular activities. What is the point, he asks, of playing lacrosse, chairing debates, organizing conferences, acting in plays and editing a section of the campus newspaper if you end up spending your whole Harvard career in overdrive, striving not to fall behind schedule? Much better to do fewer things and have time to make the most of them.
• When it comes to academic life, Lewis favours the same less-is-more approach. Get plenty of rest and relaxation, he says, and be sure to cultivate the art of doing nothing.
• “Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled,” writes the dean. “It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4×4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other fifteen pieces around.” In other words, doing nothing, being Slow, is an essential part of good thinking.
• Lewis is as keen on hard work and academic success as the next Harvard heavyweight. His point is simply that a little selective slowness can help students to live and work better.
• “In advising you to think about slowing down and limiting your structured activities, I do not mean to discourage you from high achievement, indeed from the pursuit of extraordinary excellence,” he concludes. “But you are more likely to sustain the intense effort needed to accomplish first-rate work in one area if you allow if you allow yourself some leisure time, some recreation, some time for solitude.”

Conclusion: Finding the Tempo Giusto

• The sinking of the unsinkable Titanic in 1912 had all the makings of a wake-up call to a world in thrall to speed. Many hoped the tragedy would force mankind to pause for breath, to take a long hard look at the cult of acceleration and see that the time had come to slow down a little.
• It was not to be. We are driving the planet and ourselves towards burnout. We are so time-poor and time-sick that we neglect our friends, families and partners. We barely know how to enjoy things any more because we are always looking ahead to the next thing. Much of the food we eat is bland and unhealthy.
• There is still time to change course. A powerful backlash is brewing; the Slow movement is on the march. Instead of doing everything faster, many people are decelerating, and finding that Slowness helps them to live, work, think and play better.
• Italy may be the closest thing the Slow movement has to a spiritual home. With its emphasis on pleasure and leisure, the traditional Mediterranean way of life is a natural antidote to speed. Slow Food, Slow Cities and Slow Sex all have Italian roots.
• Most of us do not wish to replace the cult of speed with the cult of slowness. Speed can be fun, productive and powerful, and we would be poorer without it. What the world needs, and what the Slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age.
• The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes in between.
• One way to cultivate inner Slowness is to make time for activities that defy acceleration – meditation, knitting, gardening, yoga, painting, reading, walking, Chi Kung.
• There is no one-size fits all formula for slowing down, no universal guide to the right speed. Each person, act, moment has its own eigenzeit. Everyone must have the right to choose the pace that makes them happy. The world is a richer place when we make room for different speeds.
• Demographics are on the side of deceleration. Populations are aging, and as we get older most of us have one thing in common: slowing down.
• Once you challenge the go-go-never-stop mindset, you start challenging it everywhere. You want to go deeper into things, instead of just skimming along on the surface.
• Many find that slowing down has a spiritual dimension. Many others do not. The Slow movement is broad enough to accommodate both.
• The great benefit of slowing down is reclaiming the time and tranquility to make meaningful connections – with people, with culture, with work, with nature, with our own bodies and minds. Some call that living better. Others would describe it as spiritual.
• Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free.
• The Slow philosophy delivers the things that really make us happy: good health, a thriving environment, strong communities and relationships, freedom from perpetual hurry.
• Decelerating will be a struggle until we rewrite the rules that govern almost every sphere of life – the economy, the workplace, urban design, education, medicine. This will take a canny mix of gentle persuasion, visionary leadership, tough legislation and international consensus.
• The big question is when the individual will become the collective. When will the many personal acts of deceleration occurring across the world reach critical mass? When will the Slow movement turn into a Slow revolution?
• To help the world reach that tipping point, each of us should try to make room for Slowness.
• A good place to start is by reassessing our relationship with time. Larry Dossey, the American doctor who coined the term ‘time-sickness,’ helps patients beat the condition by teaching them to step out of time, using biofeedback, meditation or prayer to engineer ‘time exits.’ By confronting the way the clock has ruled their lives, they are able to slow down.
• Try to think about time not as a finite resource that is always draining away, or as a bully to be feared or conquered, but as the benign element we live in. Stop living every second as if Frederick Taylor were hovering nearby, checking his stopwatch and tut-tutting over his clipboard.
• When it comes to slowing down, it is best to start small. Cook a meal from scratch. Take a walk with a friend. Read the newspaper without watching TV. Add massage to your lovemaking. Take a few minutes to sit in a quiet place.
• If a small act of Slowness feels good, move on to the bigger stuff. Rethink your working hours or campaign to make your neighbourhood more pedestrian friendly.
• Whenever I catch myself hurrying for the sake of it, I stop, take a deep breath and think: “There is no need to rush. Take it easy. Slow down.”
• The real litmus test for my own deceleration was whether I could take the hurry out of bedtime stories. I can now read several books at a sitting without worrying about the time or feeling the urge to skip a page.
• I read slowly, savouring every word, heightening the drama or humour with assumed voices and facial expressions. My son, who is now four, loves it, and story time has become a meeting of minds rather than a war of words. My flirtation with the One-Minute Bedtime Story is now a distant memory.
• I asked my son if he wanted me to read more. He rubbed his eyes. “Daddy, I think that’s enough stories for tonight. I feel quite tired.” He kissed me on the cheek and slid under his duvet. I dimmed the bedside lamp before leaving the room. Smiling, I walked slowly down the stairs.

Notes

Resource List

Acknowledgements

Index