Slow down now blog

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.” — Albert Einstein

Guy Claxton’s book, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind, is remarkable. It’s a worthwhile read and makes a good case for the practical value of slowing down. He coins a term, “The Undermind.” This is not quite the same as the unconscious, but it is about slow knowing, or intuition. Intuition needs to be nurtured. But intuition is given short shrift in a results-oriented environment.

If it weren’t for science, I would have died at the age of nine from a burst appendix. So I appreciate science. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. But the scientific way of thinking now dominates how we think about everything. We have become myopic. Mathematics and science are the most valued subjects, but the arts are now second-class.

Rational thinking has its place, but when we look at all experience rationally we become lost. We lose the ability of slow knowing. You can’t quantify how much you love someone. You can’t weigh your dreams. And by dreams, I don’t mean aspirations. By dream, I mean the experienced you have when asleep. There are other ways of knowing that reductive science knows nothing about.

Many people agree there is a need for creativity. But the time, effort, and resources to become creative are ignored. The mechanistic goal-oriented results-driven organization is a brute machine. It may be efficient, but it isn’t intelligently creative. People who have had no exposure to the creative process unsurprisingly have a difficult time seeing its value.

Intuition and rationality have been at odds since the dawn of time, but each has its place.

The paradox here is in order to generate new ideas quickly, we need to slow down. Creative ideas need rich soil in which to grow. Ideas need incubating; and that takes time. Claxton cites the mathematician, Henri Pointcaré:

Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind… The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident…

See Claxton, Guy, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, (HarperCollins, 2000 , p 60)

The first book I read of Claxon’s is called Wise Up. He writes about the difference between D-mode thinking (deliberate) and a more intuitive way. Like the notion of Slow itself, Wise Up, turns educational theory upside down.

Children understand creativity. They’re good at “making things up,” or “let’s pretend.” I’m convinced all of us are naturally creative, but somewhere along the road, we get educated out of creativity. We are told to stop playing about and grow up.

Understanding and engaging in active play opens the mind to new possibilities. Play for children is not only pure enjoyment, it develops their worldview and abilities. Adults often become rigid, but they can slow down, loosen up, and get creative.

Rushing to judgment is a problem. If you judge an idea too soon, you run the risk of killing it before it’s fully born. When we are in a rush to get things done our view is limited. We need a shift. Here are some creativity killers:

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” -Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” -Popular Mechanics, predicts the future of computing, 1949.

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” -Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

Ideas need time to be mulled over. They need to be played with.

Can patience become a virtue again?

Laziness is vilified. We are afraid of being thought of as lazy. But not doing anything, and waiting to see what happens is part of the creative way. It’s part of the slow way. If we are to have insight, to change our perspective, then we need to do something differently.

Even though we may be uncomfortable with uncertainty, we need to learn how to manage it and not go looking for unrealistic sure-fire solutions. The reality is we live in a precarious world. Being creative requires us to step out into the unknown, to be willing to fail (or at least reassess what failure might be). And for that we need to slow down now.

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
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Bertrand Russell said that organized people are just too lazy to look for things. Some people are fanatical about David Allen and his getting things done (GTD) promise. But what happens when you have got all those things done? If the goal is to do nothing, then I can appreciate that. But getting things done in order to do more things seems slightly bonkers to me. Is life just about cramming more things in?

We are not machines. Machines are efficient. People are proficient. There is a difference.

Thinking of ourselves as ‘productive’ is a kind of violence. Many of us have jobs in which we are treated like machines. We are measured by output. But this mechanistic approach doesn’t need to seep into how we see ourselves. All of us have private lives. More than that, each of us is a singularity. Each of us is unique. We inhabit our own territory. It’s easier to find that territory when we slow down.

Doing nothing is at best suspect and at worst subversive. If we slow down enough maybe—just maybe—we will discover our own thinking; our own unique perspectives; our own way of being in the world.

We live in a culture obsessed with hard work. I would never say anything bad about hard work. Hard work is necessary—sometimes. But hard work isn’t an end in itself. Some of us have forgotten how to slow down— how to enjoy. Americans don’t do nothing well.

We take frenetic vacations. We try to impress our peers by where we have been. Vacations are a status symbol. But what is enjoyment? There is that word joy in there. Are we capable of joy by going somewhere else? Isn’t joy a spontaneous experience? Sometimes we are miserable. Sometimes we are happy. None of this lasts. I don’t think we can buy joy. But we can have a relationship with ourselves. And that takes time and, for me at least, solitude.

Anthony Storr, in his book Solitude, understands solitude as a virtue, a pleasure, and the ground of creativity. Our fast-paced lives are designed to keep us from this experience.

I learned to slow down in school. Right after lunch we had a nap on a blanket. I admit that this was a long time ago, and I was only about three or four. But this wise practice should be reinstated. I respond well to rest and renewal. I am useless when exhausted.

We need a slow school. We need get industry on board. We need a nap room. Why work hard if there is no reward? My quality of life is better when I’m rested.

As current thinking goes, we work hard now for a better future. I am all for it. But we shouldn’t mortgage the present for an imagined future. Slow is a moderate approach. Our present is revealed to us the more we slow down.

Efficiency has its place, but let’s not over do it. No matter how much of an organized system I could put in place, I would spend more time trying to maintain it. I may spend time looking for that missing sock, or try to find my keys, but a certain amount of mess is fine with me. I am not too lazy to look for things. And when puttering about I sometimes make remarkable discoveries.

Not all of us can slow down, but it is a worthy goal.

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
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Have you noticed a change in tone in this blog? Are we veering toward the serious and leaving the laugh lane behind?

Well, not exactly behind, because the main site will continue to be the official site of the International Institute of Not Doing Much.

I have been struggling in my slowness. I am on the fifth revision of a piece about how Dr. Emile Lenteur discovered Relaxons. You know, those particles given off by slow people that calm the harried and hurried. But I digress.

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The whole point about this blog in the first place was to discuss slow. I see that there are more readers in Mexico and Spain for both the main site and this blog. This makes me happy, but what can that mean? The main site is about humor, and it plays with language: the English language. So how does that come across in translation?

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Apart from an aspiration (sadly not realized) to a life fulfilling idleness, slowing down has been a transformative experience for me. Some would say I never sped up, but to them I say, “bah!”

I’ve been reading about the subject for a few years now. It was a little book I found in a second-hand bookstore, Leisure, The basis of culture written by Josef Pieper. That book started me of on my slow journey. I found myself investigating philosophy, psychology, and creativity.

Slow is an integral part of the creative process. I even started a philosophy group. We met every two weeks for five years. We poked and prodded our assumptions. We did drink a lot of tea. We demonstrated tolerance. At least I did, as there were a number of otherwise fine human beings who preferred to drink coffee instead of tea. This is the downside of a Brit living in America. I can’t get them enthused enough about tea. This taught me that people are different and toleration, like patience, is a virtue.

Last week, I was thumbing through my Oxford Companion to Philosophy and came across a short entry on Nishida Kitaro, a twentieth century Japanese philosopher and founding father of the Kyoto School. I hunted around on Amazon and found some works of his. None were in my fine local library. But the reviews were daunting. Difficult is the word that comes to mind.

I am all for having a go at understanding something new, but I am really not into intellectual flagellation. I already did that when I majored in pretension at art school. But this short entry made me curious. What could be self-identity of absolute contradictories?The Japanese have an idea of “nothingness” that we don’t have in the West. I needed to find out more.

I did find an essay on Nishida by Takeuchi Yoshinori that I think even I can grasp. Next, I am going to talk about slow and Action-Intuition; and how that relates to the creative process. Whether you write, paint, put on plays or whatever creative endeavor you are interested in, there is a good reason to slow down.

Anyone for Zen?

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
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I posted an article on rushing to failure on my business blog yesterday. Why are so few businesses able to step back and consider action before rushing forward?

Failing fast and failing often has its merits. What we call failure can be just part of a natural learning process. Slowing down lets us consider and incubate ideas. Many of us are more interested in action that can be measured. We learn to do things fast, but creativity has its own agenda with regard to time.

Failure is, of course, a judgment. It assumes there is a defined goal and there is only one right answer. It’s worth reexamining the notion of failure as a negative.

I think it was Peter Cook who said, I learned from my mistakes. I learned that I can repeat every one of them.

There are those wise people who suggest that they can learn from other people’s mistakes. But situations do have a way of being more complex than they at first seem. Oversimplification is a sort of blindness.

I recently attended the summer institute for somatic psychology in Berkeley with Stanley Keleman. I won’t go into details here, but he said that the formative approach has no failure quotient. This is useful notion for me. It is about growth.

Failure is a necessary part of learning. A child learning to walk doesn’t just give up after a few tries. In the same way, those of us who operate micro-businesses have to constantly learn. The ability to slow down, step back, and consider our situation is valuable. It gives us perspective.

I write for a living and help small businesses get clear about what they are doing. I often encounter those who are driven by anxiety and fear. This always shows up as rushing. It’s hard sometimes to get those I serve to slow down. But many do get it; and they benefit.

Doing less, slowly, seems like a joke, but it is of immense practical value. Slow may be counterintuitive but it is wonderful to work with those that, “get it.”

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
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