The slow
food movement has been around a while now. I love the idea. Meals that take a
while to cook slowly are often the best, like the stews in Portugal. But even
more I like the idea of eating (and drinking) slowly enough to savour and enjoy
what the meal has to offer, while also securing nutritional and social benefits.
Last week I
read that there is now a slow news movement. I think the idea is to cut
yourself off from the daily noise every so often, especially avoiding the
constant catching up now available via internet and smart phone. I can see some
merit in this too, though it hardly seems to be as valuable a concept as slow
food. But it did get me thinking about what other slow movements might make
sense.
I have time
to do this sort of thing now. Three years ago I chose to move from a time poor
existence to a time rich one. Marketers use this segmentation, and I find it
can be very useful. Most people spend their lives either in a permanent race
against time, or in a situation where they feel the need to drag time out. It
is quite sad really, that time, in a way all we have, becomes the enemy of most
of us. You see time rich people dragging activities out, for example walking up
and down each aisle in a supermarket, or painstakingly collecting coupons. Time
poor folk multi-task and are looking for convenient solutions. It is not a
coincidence that fast food and slow food have developed at the same time.
I feel
blessed that in some ways I now have the best of both worlds. I have developed
the useful habits of time poor people, with the learned ability to get tasks
done efficiently. Modern technology helps a lot with this too. Yet I have lots
of free time, which I am learning to savour. I make mistakes – many days I will
still gobble down my breakfast before I remember that it is an opportunity for
eked out joy. That first hour of the day can be such a pleasure if I allow it
to be. But I am learning.
Time poor
people in corporations are taught time management. Typically, the four box
model used has importance and urgency as its axes. The logic is to avoid the
trap of being swallowed by the urgent and neglecting the important but
non-urgent tasks. The main technique seems to be compartmentalise time in order
to reserve some for these high value things (usually high value for the
corporation too, of course).
This
approach misses at least two dimensions. One is joy, which I’ll discuss in this
blog. The other is the value of maturing an activity. Will delay lead to a better
result? Or will a fast or spontaneous approach often do better and remove a
source of stress? Next time I’ll look more at the maturation axis, and also try
offer some practical tips, for both time rich and time poor people, to make the
most of these axes.
So, let us
look at joy, or its converse, unwelcome stress. Does taking time over an
activity make it more joyful? Or does rushing it add unnecessarily to stress?
The answers won’t be the same for everyone. But it is worth reviewing frequent
activities to work out where we might be missing out on joy.
Food is an
obvious example of an activity that has much joy to yield, but many of us just
reduce to as short a time as possible. Love-making is even more obvious, but
hopefully most people don’t need as much reminding of that opportunity.
Slow
meditation has become popular recently. Just focusing on breathing for some
minutes each day helps us keep balance. If we want to add in some yoga for
fitness or prayer for humility or wonder, that is just fine as well.
Slow travel
is a great opportunity. Train travel can be so relaxing, simply because it
makes time go more slowly than driving. I enjoy long plane journeys too – at
least the part in the air. But best of all is walking. Whether in a city or the
country, there is always something joyful to see, smell or listen to if we give
it our focus and enough time. Last week I had a wonderful afternoon in
Manhattan, just walking, with only a vague plan for destinations, but picking
up good places to visit that I happened to pass, while observing the diversity
of human activity, the cherry blossoms and the changing effects of light on
buildings. I walked at a fair pace (better to keep a bit fit) but consciously
avoided hurrying, so a traffic light or a slow pedestrian couldn’t stress me.
It does not
surprise me that walking (at a reasonable pace) has now been found in a study
to be more beneficial than running. It is a bit like slow food and its
nutrition. I remember in my youth a craze for the game of squash, which is the
polar opposite of slow. Even then I guessed that the total exhaustion after a
game of squash was probably doing me more harm than good, and a litany of heart
attack stories since appear to support that theory.
I think the
slow approach is good for holidays as well, just trying to soak in the
occasion, the location and the relaxation. About ten years ago my then family
started to add a third week to our summer holiday, and the difference was
immediate. About half way through the middle week layers of stress started to
tumble off.
New York has
also taught me to enjoy driving more too, or at least to minimise its stress.
Here, the traffic light phasing is very slow, and disruptions are frequent, but
somehow the system usually works and blockages eventually clear as quickly as
they came. The trick is never to be hurried, but just let things happen. If I
have a clear road I still go fast, but I don’t try to beat lights or game the
road or other drivers. It might cost me a minute or two, but the result is I
enjoy driving again. Listening to New Yorkers and their blaring horns, I
suspect quite a few don’t.
Then there
are slow hobbies. Isn’t it uncanny how gardeners, bird watchers or recreational
fishermen always seem very balanced people? I don’t do any of these, but
walking is similar in many ways.
Even slow
sports have a role. Watching sports that develop slowly can give a lot of joy,
test cricket being the classic example. But a long league season has similar
tension in any sport. The US sports all build joy from tension well, especially
towards the end of a match. I think it is illustrative how cricket has
developed, with a fast option (twenty 20) and a slow option (tests) both doing
well, at the expense of the traditional one day game, caught in the middle. I
expect other sports to develop in this bi-polar way as well.
I love slow
entertainment. Remember back in the eighties when Inspector Morse came onto the
TV? Its magic was a two hour format, where action and suspense developed slowly
and where characters were given space to develop. This ran completely counter
to most other shows and created a popular niche. I’m delighted to say that the
niche persists, and has been captured in the US by British programmes and
films. Public service TV has a genre called Masterpiece, including all sorts of
slow entertainment. We love it. I wish more movie and TV series directors would
see the potential, since so many seem to just pack in as much action as they
can. Lincoln was a good exception.
Finally,
there are slow friendships. I always think a good test of a friendship comes
when you are together for quite a long time but without obvious things to do or
talk about. Being comfortable in silence or spasmodic conversation is a great
gift, and a joy. I have a new technique at parties now – things I used to
dread. That is to wait for people to come to me, rather than trying too hard to
find others. Just like with driving, or indeed with many pastimes, taking ones
time can bring rewards and remove tension. Speed dating seems an alien concept
to me, but then maybe that is another emerging example of bi-polarity.
So, how much
joy are you missing out on? Even if you are time poor, I suggest there is lots
of potential. Start with how you multi task. A lot of multi-tasking is good,
and technology helps us do more of it. But are you losing your joy as a result
sometimes? An example. I love walking. I love listening to my i-pod. And I love
my daily café latte (I am obviously becoming an American!). But sometimes I do
all three at once, just because I can. And the result – I have just realised
that none of the three are as joyful when I do them together. So now I sit in
Starbucks a bit longer, and walk sometimes without the i-pod. On the other
hand, a bath, reading and a glass of red wine seem to go together very nicely,
thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment