Where we live
This is where readers of SlowDownNow.org live this week.
This is where readers of SlowDownNow.org live this week.
Scientists tell us that we change every cell in our bodies every seven years. So are we the same person? Now, that bears thinking about. Even what seems solid, isn’t really when you look closely. We are just bundles of energy, or in the case of the internet, pixels on a screen, or ones and zeros. We are being born and we are dying at the same time. No wonder it’s hard to hang on to things.
Take Slow London for instance, what happened to it? There they were, happily on the internet extolling the virtues of slowing down in a fast-paced environment. Let’s face it,
I typed in www.slowlondon.com and got nothing. I checked www.domaintools.com and their domain name is still current. There is a story there somewhere. Has Slow London been consigned to the lost sock draw of the internet?
It’s probably just me, but I get the impression that this blogging thing is about writing regularly. I am fine with regularity. I play golf regularly: about once every fifteen years. I think you could call me a slow golfer.
One thing I learned about golf is that taking large chunks out of the course is considered bad form. There are those that believe one can improve with practice. I was brought up by two golf-addicted parents. My revenge is a story about golf.
If I am not mistaken, the idea is to post to a blog often. Now “often” means different things to different people. I’ve been reading Slow Leadership. For someone that is writing about slow, Carmine Coyote, the blog’s author, must be going at a fair clip.
I think he is talking to those that want to slow down, yet still work inside the corporate machine. I wonder if it is possible. During the dot.com boom, I met a number of otherwise functioning and intelligent adults who were proud of the long hours they worked. They were proud that they had a mobile phone clipped to their belts. Who knows, they might be summoned at any minute to dispense vital expertise of a critical nature. They even enjoyed complaining about their lot. So people are different.
Now, I’m no Einstein. In fact, I can be mind-bogglingly dim. But I do know that Einstein spent a lot of time with his feet up on the desk staring out of the window of his Princeton office. That impresses me. And what’s more, he didn’t have a neat desk.
I was browsing around in a book shop the other day and came across a perfect mess. (A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abrahamon and David Freedman.) It’s my kind of book.
At the beginning of chapter one there is a lovely quote by Einstein, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?”
In a nutshell, the book is about the benefit of flexibility over rigidity. The authors lambaste the hot new profession of organizer. They say that the time spent getting your home-garage-office in order outweighs the time spent looking for things.
Now, I spend a fair amount of time looking for things. It’s one of life’s adventures. As long as you’re not in a hurry you can embark on a journey of discovery. And this afternoon, when looking for my glasses, I discovered a bill I needed to have paid. Disorder works!
That doesn’t seem right. However, Americans have plenty of leisure time because academics tell us so.
Last year, the Economist suggested we, in America, have plenty of time off. The article was based on the findings of Mr. Aguiar, an economist, and Mr. Hurst from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. It is no surprise that the discussion around leisure becomes quantitative. I’m sure both gentlemen are very good at counting.
The basis of the studies came from time-use diaries. This method does inform us, but only to a point. Who keeps a time-use diary anyway? Well, I admit that I do, but only because, as a copywriter, I charge by the hour. Once work is over, that is a different matter.
The learned gents argue that Americans have more leisure time than previously thought. They have collected data to prove it. I mentioned the study to my stepdaughter in New York. She works full-time, is in her thirties, married with a young child. Her indignant response was, “I’m sure no woman ever wrote for the Economist!”
It’s not easy to understand the difference between work and leisure. We don’t have an adequate definition of either. Of course, studies are only correct until something else disproves them.
Employment figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics don’t tell the whole story. Those numbers don’t account for people who have given up looking for work, are otherwise unable to work, or the long-term desperate. We know about what we measure, but not much else.
From anecdotal evidence, there are many of us who spend vast amounts of time, preparing for work, traveling to work, and actually working. I know this because I have conducted my own long-term study. My wife can spend a huge amount of time in the bathroom getting ready for work. Any culture that does not honor work is doomed—but we do have a tendency to overdo it.
We live in a culture of quantity. Josef Pieper’s seminal book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture warned us against the “Total World of Work.”
A vacation can be a respite from work. But if all a vacation gives us is enough renewal to go back to work, its function is limited. We vacate on a vacation: we go somewhere else. The notion is of retreat. Two weeks of activity, even in an exotic location, is unlikely to change the way we see the world.
We are an action oriented cluture. But action without the time to consider is dangerous. I went to a management consultant meeting not long ago. This is a group that keeps tight schedules. I asked who schedules unstructured time, a time to putter, or do nothing. I was met with blank stares of incredulity. Is slow that subversive?
If we don’t experience a positive and beneficial state of doing nothing, we won’t value it. Slowing down has its dangers. There is a reason some of us need the constant companionship of the TV; the radio playing in the car; the avoidance of silence. There is a terror of being alone. What might we find out?
The “Ugly American” is a stereotype. But according to the US government it is an accurate picture of Americans abroad. Amazingly something is being done about it. Next month, industry and government join forces to give American employees abroad a “World Citizen Guide.” The guide is designed to help them behave appropriately. There is even talk of issuing the guide as with every new passport.
The typical Ugly American is loud, arrogant, and boastful. The guide helpfully suggests that Americans abroad should slow down. Here we talk, move, live, and eat fast. Of course, not everyone does: but slowing down is sound advice.
Talking loud is an invasion of other people’s privacy. Paying attention to how others are behaving will give clues. Religion is a matter of privacy, too. When we are secure, we don’t need to impress others with what we believe or what we have.
Our foreign policy has not enamored us to many countries that we recently had cordial relations with. If you talk politics, then do most of the listening. Listening with interest to different points of view or learning about different cultural practices is always a winning strategy.
It is so important that we act as ambassadors when we go abroad. America is full of generous, considerate, and well-mannered people. Slow down, listen, ask questions, be polite, and win friends. Politeness is patriotic.
Patients for patients
Not long ago my doctor retired. He didn’t cure me of an otherwise terminal illness, but he did look after me. I have been lucky. Apart from a nasty case of poison oak where I had swollen up like a balloon, there hasn’t been much wrong with me under his watch.
He was a gentleman doctor of the old school, spoke French, and played badminton. After my yearly exam, we would sit down in his office and he would go over the results. He was the quintessential slow doctor. I liked him and his front desk help. She always knew who I was when I called. I like that, too. I felt comfortable with my doctor—well, about as comfortable as I can with a man who gives me a rectal exam.
But his retiring threw me into a maelstrom of medical-bureaucratic hyperactivity. The new doctors office was simply too busy to pick up the telephone. They had especially heavy call volume, and all of their agents were busy. I was very happy to be in good health in my attempts to contact the office, because it required strength and fortitude.
I left several messages asking for an appointment. But that office clearly had better things to do than to talk to a new patient. But patience pays off. On my fourth attempt I spoke to a woman who seemed to have attention deficit disorder. I wondered if the office was reduced to letting patients work off their medical bills in kind. It turned out that the woman I spoke to was not a patient but an employee.
The first question she asked me was my age. She seemed in an enormous hurry, and she spoke very fast in a high pitched voice. Right after I told her how old I was, she asked me the same question again. She seemed to think that my age was the most important thing to know. Perhaps she didn’t know that the living human could be as old as I am, because after I told her a second time, she apologized and asked me the same question yet again.
I asked her if she was ready, and she said she was. I think she must have been away the day they gave listening training.
I got the impression that being a patient wanting to see a doctor was a bother. I was interrupting something much more important.
My phone call to the hyper-breathless doctor’s office ended up being a success. I managed to calm down my frazzled interlocutor, and achieved an appointment. But I look forward to my appointment with some misgiving. Our culture does not place much emphasis on a calm and healing environment. Before we relied so much medical high-technology there was only caring and time for healing. Bernard Lown in his book The Lost Art of Healing talks about doctor patient relationship as being key to healing.
I know that being an HMO subscriber may not get you much by a way of a doctor who practices the art of healing but it will get you a few minutes with a medically trained mechanic.
This is my second attempt to find a doctor after mine retired. I had seen one doctor for ten minutes, she was interrupted by her mobile phone, told me that there was not much wrong with me, took my blood pressure, told me it was high, and prescribed some pills.
I had read that statistic about 195,000 deaths due to medical errors in the US a few years ago. I went out and bought a blood pressure gauge because I have never had high blood pressure. I put that down to a daily practice of slow exercises (Chi-Gung).
It turned out that by taking my own blood pressure several times I am just fine. I think it may have been the trip to the doctor’s office that made it high. If I had listened to that harried and hurried doctor I would have been taking blood pressure pills for nothing.
When I was growing up in England it was not unusual to have the doctor come out and visit a patient at home. Our family doctor would drop by for a cup of tea. What a luxury that seems from this perspective. We knew our doctor, and the free National Health Service worked well. But those were slower times.
I received an email the other day from a slowdownnow.org reader asking me if I was serious. Well, slow is serious. In fact, slowdownnow came out of a serious discussion on work/life balance which was originally posted on slowthinking.com. And that site, in turn was the result of my thinking that was stimulated during a face-to-face philosophical discussion group that met twice a week. The group has now disbanded but it lasted for five years. I met some interesting people I am still in touch with. Philosophy is one of those words that can turn people off. But we were street philosophers in the Socratic style rather than academics. It was all about questions, and not much about opinions. At least, that was when it was going well.
Now when it comes to talking about the serious subject of slow, the thing that struck me was that there is a danger in being what I call “preachy.” If people want to drive themselves to distraction, who am I to say they are wrong? There are those that enjoy the hectic life.
Sadly, slow is not always an option. When I first came to live in San Francisco, I was at a low ebb. I worked three jobs a day and lived for a few months at the YMCA: not the most palatial of places. It has long been turned into a “nice” hotel. I was newly divorced and had a low opinion of what I was capable of. That was years ago. I had no money, and needed to pay the rent. I couldn’t have slowed down if I’d tried. Today, things are much better.
Of course, slowdownnow.org is fun. But it is fun with some meaning. I started this blog section in order for you to comment on stories from the main site and articles posted here, or of your perspective on slow. The main site will continue to be a place for more stories. Thanks for reading.