Slowness
Holiday reading quote #1, from Carl Honore’s brilliant In Praise of Slow:
“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…Yet the Slow movement is not about turning the whole planet into a Mediterranean holiday resort. 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 … Slowness 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 somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. It means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up…
Of course, the Slow movement still faces some pretty daunting obstacles - not least our own prejudices. Even when we long to slow down, we feel constrained by a mixture of greed, inertia and fear to keep up the pace. In a world hardwired for speed, the tortoise still has a lot of persuading to do.”
Most of us do not wish to replace the cult of speed with the cult of slowness. … [what] Slowness offers is a middle path … instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between.
Thought-provoking stuff! Watch out for my forthcoming blockbuster The Way of the Teensy-Weensy, in which I strike a blow against the tyranny of the big, the bloated, the gargantuan, the Super Size and things that occupy significant amounts of space in general, but go on to reveal that a truly balanced life will embrace both the minuscule and the extensive. For, as a wise man* once said, some things are big; some things are small; but other things are in between.
*Possibly Brian Cant.
Can’t believe you haven’t got The Way of the Teensy-Weensy published yet!
And you’re right to quote Cant - suspect the quote I picked doesn’t quite do the book justice though. Yes, of course, a lot of the stuff in it is intuitively obvious (”It really is nice to have a home-cooked meal once in a while”). But I suppose one of the things that kept me reading was Honore’s admitted cynicism converning all things new-agey/self-help. And he does, slowly, get persuaded that some of it might be right.
http://adbusters.org/metas/eco/slowdownweek/#