In Praise of Slowness, Honore

introduction
the words that stop me in my tracks are: the one minute bedtime story. To help parents deal with timeconsuming tots, various others have condensed classic fairy tales into 60 second soundbites.
But now the time has come to challenge our obsession with doing everything more quickly. Speed is not
always the best policy. Evolution works on the principle of survival of the fittest, not the fastest.
Remember who won the race between the tortoise and the hare. As we hurried through life, cramming
more into every hour, we are stretching ourselves to the breaking point.
When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is
a price to pay.
Burnout used to be something you mainly found in people over 40, says one London-based life coach.
Now Im seen men and women in their 30s, and even their 20s, were completely burned out.
For a chilling vision of where this behavior leads, look no further then Japan, where the locals have a
word karoshi, that means death by overwork.
One reason we need stimulants is that many of us are not sleeping enough. With so much to do, so little
time to do it, the average American now gets 90 minutes less shot I per night and she did a century ago.
Inevitably, a life of hurry he can become superficial. When we rush, we skim the surface, and failed to
make real connections with the world or other people. As Milan Kundera wrote in his 1996 novella
slowness, when things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not
even about himself.
Restaurants report that hurried diners increasingly paid the bill and order a taxi while eating dessert.
Many fans leave sporting event early, no matter how close the score is, simply to steal a march on the
traffic. Then there is the curse of multitasking. Doing two things at once seems so clever, so efficient, so
what modern. And yet what it often means is doing two things not very well.
Instead of thinking deeply, or letting an idea simmer in the back of the mind, our instinct now is to reach
for the nearest soundbite.
But that hardly matters nowadays: in the land of speed, the man with the instant response is King.
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.
The paradox is that slow does not always mean slow. As we shall see, performing a task in a slow
manner often yields faster results.
Pg 16 From Petrini, an Italian chef: If you are always slow then you are stupid, and that is not at all what
we are aiming for, he tells me. Being slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You
decide how fast you have to go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast, tomorrow I want
to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own and temples.
Chapter 1 do everything faster
yet as soon as we start to parcel of time, the tables turn, and time takes over. We become slaves to the
schedule. Schedules give us deadlines, and deadlines by their very nature, give us a reason to rush. As
an Italian proverb puts it: man measures time, and time measures man.
The result is a gnawing disconnect between what we want from life and what we can realistically have,
which feeds the sense that there is never enough time.
Despite what people think, the discussion about speed is never really about the current state of
technology. It goes much deeper than that, it goes back to the human desire for transcendence, he says.
It is hard to think about the fact that we are going to die, its unpleasant so we constantly seek ways to
distract ourselves from the awareness of our own mortality. Speed with the sensory rush it gives, is one
strategy for distraction.

And in those three words, the authors neatly sum up what is wrong with the modern world. Take about a
four minute: do everything faster. The really make sense to speed read Proust, make love in half the time
or cook every meal in the microwave? Surely not, but the fact that someone could write the words do
everything faster underlies just how far we have gone off the rails, and how urgently we need to rethink
our whole way of life.
Chapter 2: slow is beautiful
when people Mona, oh I am so busy, I run off my feet, my life is a blur, I havent got time for anything,
but they often mean is, look at me: I am hugely important, exciting and energetic.
Chapter 3: food turning the tables on speed
then one afternoon she was munching on a salad what perusing a contract when she realized she had
just read the same paragraph 6 times without taking any of it in. She decided then and there to start
leaving the office for a lunch break, the matter what her boss said.
I find that taking time off to eat relaxes me, and I get a lot more done in the afternoons than I did before.
Without mentioning the new lunchtime regime, her boss recently complimented her on the improvement
in her work.
Chapter 4: cities: blending old and new
being slow does not mean being torpid, backward or technophobic.
Before we go any further though lets shoot down one of the great driving mists: that speeding is a
reliable way to save time. True on a long journey of traffic free highway you will arrive earlier at your
destination. But the benefit on a short trip is minimal. For example just takes under 2 minutes to drive
2 miles at 50 mph. Crank up the speed to a reckless 80 mph, and you arrive 54 seconds earlier, barely
enough time to check your voicemail.
Chapter 5: mind-body: mens sana in corpore sano
in the war against the cult of speed, the frontline is inside our heads. Acceleration will remain our default
setting until attitudes change. The change in what we think is just the beginning. If the slow movement
is really to take root, we have to go deeper. We have to change the way we think.
To make the most of our time, and to avoid boredom, with Philip every spare moment with minced told
stimulation. When did you last sit in a chair, close your eyes and just relax?
Einstein appreciated the need to marry the two modes of thought: computers are incredibly fast,
accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are
powerful beyond imagination. That is why the smartest most creative people know when to let the mind
to wander and went to knuckle down to hard work. In other words went to be slow and went to be fast.
So how can the rest of us access slow thinking, especially in a world that prizes speed in action? The first
step is to relax, put aside in patients, stop struggling and learn to accept uncertainty and inaction. Wait
for ideas to incubate below the radar, rather than striving to brainstorm them to the surface. But the
mind be quiet and still. As one send master put it, instead of saying dont just sit there, do something we
should sit opposite, dont just do something, sit there.
Chapter 6: medicine: doctors and patience
chapter 7: sex: a lover with a slowhand
chapter 8: work: the benefits of working less hard
Chapter 9: leisure: the importance of being at rest
Plato believed that the highest form of leisure was to be still and receptive to the world, a view echoed
by modern intellectuals. Franz Kafka put it this way: you dont need to leave your room. The main sitting
at your table and listen, dont even listen, simply wait. Dont even wait, be quite still and solitary. The
world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
In its uniqueness, its quirks and imperfections, a handmade item such as a knitted shawl carries the
imprint of its creator. We sense the time and care that went into the making, and feel at deeper
attachment to it as a result.

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 bus. He wanted to double major in biology in English, and cram
all the work into three instead of the usual four years. He was exasperated with his academic advisor,
who was unable, or unwilling, to devise a schedule to accommodate all the courses. As he listened to the
student moan about being held back, who is felt a lightbulb flashed above his head. I remember thinking,
wait a minute, you need help, but not in the way you think you do, says the Dean. You need to take time
to think about what is really important, rather than trying to figure out how to pack as much as you can
into the shortest possible schedule.
After the meeting Lewis began to reflect on how the 21 st century student has become a disciple of hurry.
From there it was a short step to speaking out against the scourge of overstuffed schedules accelerated
degree programs. 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.
Was also a neat press cease of the ideas that lie at the heart of the slow philosophy. The letter which now
goes out Harvard freshman every year is entitled, slow down.
What is the point he asked of plane the cross, chairing debates, organizing conferences, acting in plays
and editing a section of the campus newspaper if you end up sending your whole Harvard career in
overdrive, striving not to fall behind schedule? Much better to do a few things you have time to make the
most of them.
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 x 4 puzzle that makes it possible to
move the other 15 pieces around. In other words doing nothing being slow is an essential part of good
thinking.
In advising you need 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 to allow yourself some leisure time, some recreation, sometime for solitude.
Children increasingly pay a price for leading rushed lives. Kids as young as five now suffer from upset
stomachs, headaches insomnia depression and eating disorders brought on by stress. Like everyone else
in our always on society, many children get too little sleep now days. This can make them cranky jumpy
and impatient. Sleep deprived kids have more trouble making friends. This in a greater chance of being
underway, since deep sleep triggers the release of growth hormone.
Conclusion: finding the tempo giusto
yet all is not lost. There is still time to change course. Though speed busyness and an obsession with
saving time remain the hallmarks of a modern life, a powerful backlash is brewing. The slow movement
is on the march. Instead of doing everything faster, many people argue accelerating, and finding that
slowness helps them to live a work they can play better.