At your wits’ end because you can’t access your e.mails every hour, frazzled because your children have misplaced the TV remote, stressed out by too many text messages? Take time to reflect, join the Slow Movement and watch your life really connect.
When London journalist Kate Muir landed up with an unmanageable version of Kate’s Bush and a gammy leg after trying to blow-dry her hair and do yoga at the same time as well as a bleeding nose while texting on the Tube steps, she found herself in the throes of a multitasking epiphany.
After a long, hard think, Muir realised that though her job, personality and lifestyle required plenty of cerebral stimulation, she was over-connected and spiritually impoverished. Enter the Slow Movement, an offshoot of the International Slow Food Movement, initiated by a group of anti-McDonald’s protestors 20 years ago in Rome, Italy.
Says life coach Sally Lever, who specialises in teaching people how to live a sustainable life,: “While technology has certainly aided communication in many ways, the downside is that urbanites are finding themselves more isolated than ever because of over-reliance on quick fixes and electronic devices.
“Real connection – on a personal, social and spiritual level – is becoming more the exception than the norm, as we communicate with anyone anywhere at the click of a button or mouse ove the face-to-face kind. This is what the Slow Movement aims to address.”
While embracing a movement of any description may sound ominously like taking on the beliefs of a political ideology, Muir says the beauty of living more slowly and thoughtfully can mean nothing more than adapting your lifestyle. “Lying on a beach in Ibiza with nothing to do has always meant endless boredom for me. So I think I’ll stick to a personal foxtrot – slow, slow, quick, quick, slow.”
Balance the techno scale
For Chris Barylick, a journalist with his finger on the global technological pulse, a meeting with an old high-school friend sounded loud alarm bells which many of us choose to ignore for the sake of expedience.
“I sat down with him for the first time in more than a year around Christmas, and watching the snow fall, I asked what had happened to him. He spouted geek wisdom, talking about technology and checking code on his Palm Pilot. And nothing else.
“Ask him how he’s doing on an interpersonal level in any way and it’s deflected back to the thousands of mp3’s in his collection, Monty Python quotes, Terry Pratchett novels or the latest upcoming anime series. I didn’t know what to think when he logged on to his e-mail later in the day, his hands moving so fast that it seemed like he had done nothing else for the past four years. His social skills are nothing compared to his online prowess; somehow something seemed to have gone wrong somewhere along the way.”
While the Slow Movement offers basic tenets to reconnect to a time when the extended family and cultural tradition played a major part in keeping us connected, Barylick’s solution is finding a balance.
“Everything’s good in moderation, and the important thing to find a balance between the real world and technology, even if one is more comfortable than the other. Today’s technology was never meant to adversely effect our social lives, but in some cases it can outright replace them. The time may come when you have to realize for yourself or another person that it’s a means to an end, not the end to all means.”
Says celebrated author of In Praise of Slow, Carl Honore, this could mean making a tiny change like slowing down on the information superhighway, like a senior manager at IBM who appends this footnote to every email: “Read your mail just twice each day. Recapture your life’s time and relearn to dream. Join the slow e.mail movement!”
The bottom line? “Life isn’t a spectator sport, nor has it ever been. Turn off the computer, step outside on a random weekend night and see where your feet take you among the thousand options that open up when you’re looking for them,” advises Barylick.
Downshift to upshift
The overriding message of the Slow Movement is to downshift, or choose voluntary simplicity, in order to upshift our lifestyles. Says Lever, editor of www.sallylever.co.uk, “Downshifting is a viable solution for those of us who find maintaining an externally imposed ‘standard of living’ stressful and meaningless. It’s about finding a quality of life that transcends all of that and concentrates on living according to our core values.”
For journalist Karin Schimke, the alarm bells came when she realised she was on a never-ending treadmill because of her over-achieving work ethic: “My distress at being a sloth at heart was at its zenith when I worked in a Johannesburg for two years in the mid-90s, when the culture of she-who-works-longest-wins still won out over gentleness and thoughtfulness every time. I had a two-day migraine once a week for three particularly horrible months. I was also fat as a piggy, because I never had time to eat proper food or exercise, and I spent my weekends collapsed in a misery of work-excess, unable to muster the energy to go for a spirit-lifting walk in the park.”
Like many career women who derive their sense of identity from their work achievements, Schimke was torn between material and soul success. “And all the time I wondered what the hell was wrong with me that this life didn’t give me the kick it seemed to give everyone else. If lunch was for ninnies, I wanted to be a ninny. Except I was afraid I might become a social outcast if I showed I needed rest or food. So I quietly hid my penchant for the slow life until a book called “How to be idle” found its way to me last year.”
When Schimke’s husband resigned unexpectedly over a moral issue, the family made a conscious decision to downscale financially, which meant gleaning pleasure from the natural things in life, rather than material pleasures. Schimke started growing her own vegetables, replaced her car with walks wherever possible, and turned family meals into connective conversations.
With the pace turned down, life began to organise itself. “Sunday evenings – with slight tweaks to the system just before bed every night – are when I do most of my work. I co-ordinate diaries, compose the week’s menu, do stock-taking and make a list of what needs to be bought so that I only have to go to the shops once. I put out everyone’s clothes for Monday, prepare lunch boxes, write cards, wrap gifts, plan, and generally assemble the mind map that will help me glide through my week.”
She also thrives on the little pleasures of life. “On Monday mornings I have a clean bra. Dinner is defrosting. There is petrol in the roving pigsty I call my car. Life is beautiful.”
Mellow out
While toning down urban life to a more natural pace is the answer for most, some, like Frik Grobbelaar, believe the only thing to do is give it all up and live in the country.
Says Grobbelaar whose decision to buy a farm in 1985 has lead to bigger dreams. “I realised that life on the planet was unsustainable if we carried on our consumerist behaviour, and decided to open my doors to anyone interested in alternative lifestyles. I now have international healers and local experts giving lectures on permaculture and ancient healing practices to try to educate the public on living a more holistic lifestyle.”
“Living sustainably simply means living in a way that minimises our negative impact on the planet. On a day to day level, it’s about reducing our consumption of the world’s resources, re-using items rather than throwing them away and recycling our waste among a host of other things. On a more personal level, sustainable living is about valuing our health and wellbeing, our relationships and community above our need to consume and exploit,” explains Lever.
While living at a slower pace also means better health, reconnecting to natural rhythms and the world around us is that we stand more chance of living to a riper, more meaningful old age. As Schimke says: “The other day I found out that a man I admire greatly – a professor of philosophy – was 70 and not 55 as I’d thought. When I expressed my surprise, he said: ‘I spent my life in quiet rooms in armchairs thinking, drinking coffee and talking to colleagues. Time passes slowly when you’ve lived your life that way.’ And I thought: well, that’s how I shall age. Mellow-ly.”
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Go Slow
- Travel slow. Instead of taking a planned tour, or slotting into pre-arranged hotel itineraries, find self-catering accommodation in out-of-the-way places, buy all your food from local traders and experience the sights by listening to locals’ advice. Slow travel is all about connecting to culture and creating an intense experience through total involvement. Or go one step further and get involved in voluntourism – help a disadvantaged child or volunteer to teach at a local school.
- Eat slow. Even if you don’t join the Slow Food Movement which has over 65 000 members in 42 countries, think carefully about the choices you make when buying and preparing food. The simplest way to do this is to teach your children about the origins and tastes of food, and savour natural foods when you prepare a meal. Says ethnobotanist Dale Millard, “Our fast-paced consumerist lifestyles have made us lose touch with where our food comes from and what it tastes like.” The spin-off of preparing and eating natural, wholesome meals is that we get to take time to nurture our social connections as well.
- Grow slow. According to Millard, who embraces ancient spiritual healing and crop-growing practices from tribes as diverse as the South American Mayans and South African Shangaan: “You can grow your own salad greens and vegetables in your home with the aid of three plastic bottles which you hollow out, fill with fertilised soil and erect in a tier structure. By placing a container at the bottom, you get to recycle the water which you pour from the top. In this way you not only sustain yourself but also keep in touch with the environment.”
- Read slow. With the internet and passive television viewing, one of our biggest losses is forgetting to read books and filling our heads with information instead. Join a library and take time every day to feast on the pleasures of the written word. Fiction is an especially creative way of sparking the imagination and enhancing creativity.
- Think slow. It’s no accident that many teachers are reviving the lost art of chess to teach children to process information more constructively. Quite the opposite to what it sounds, thinking slow actually means the neurons connect more intensely and produce a deeper understanding and involvement.
- Buy slow. Besides organic food, local hand-made fashion is coming into its own and is often more trendy, and more individualistic, than upmarket designer stuff. Supporting local also feeds into community connectivity.
- Find a slow hobby. Knitting, crosswords, family trees, patchworking, painting, writing poetry – the list is endless, but, instead of overstimulating, provides head space to really be creative.
- Exercise slow. Get into yoga, meditation or a gentle form of exercise that helps the brain unwind. The benefits will manifest not only in your body, but your spiritual awareness will improve too. Sports that provides full engagement with natural elements like surfing or hiking are first prize, but taking yourself on a daily 20-minute walk is a daily springclean in itself.
- Dream slow. Says Lever, “Anybody can live their dreams if they really want to. It’s not a lack of any particular intelligence or personality trait that prevents some of us doing that. We all have it in us. Rather, it’s eliminating the physical and psychological clutter that gets in the way that’s important. It’s strengthening your character, not changing your personality that will get you there!” Lever believes there are three main steps to success: Having a strong desire or intention; holding a deeply held belief that it is possible, accepting it into your life when it happens.
Published in Aquarius, Dubai. Copyright Sharon Marshall 2007.
