Slow down now blog

Today, Reuters published an article, “Lack of sleep may be deadly, research shows”.

Clearly lack of sleep leads to grumpiness. You must have had a bad night or two in your time? The French call a night where you can’t get to sleep a white night.

Getting enough sleep is important if you are going to adopt the slow lifestyle. A UK member of the International Institute of Not Doing Much (IINDM) who writes The Art of Tea has been struggling with how to arrange his life so he can stay longer in bed.

William Demnet, in his book, The Promise of Sleep, cited a study where Harvard graduates did better by sleeping more and studying less.

This makes a lot of sense to me. The mind needs time to process, to incubate input. But the fast-paced, rushed lifestyle thinks of sleep as an impediment. I blame the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison for this sort of ‘always on’ mentality.

I’ve been reading, How to be Idle, by Tom Hogkinson. He makes a compelling argument for staying in bed longer in the morning. In fact, I’ve been trying it out and I recommend it, too.

If you’re the sort of person that goes in for creativity, then allowing yourself to be in that early-morning hypnagogic state or even lucid dreaming will only help you listen to your muse.

Of course, if you’re cosmetically challenged, then remember what Sophia Loren said about sleep being a natural beauty treatment. Sleep more, get smarter.

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I just found this video review of SlowDownNow.org on the Business News Network website. Apparently this came out in January so it’s only fitting that a civilized amount of time has elapsed before my discovering it.

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
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A good belly laugh is like getting an internal massage. Your whole body is engaged. No wonder we use the expression to ‘burst out laughing.’ There’s a build up of tension and then a release. The effect is relaxing.

Laughter is a movement. We talk about emotion (a somatic motion). Feelings cause our body to behave in some way. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, our bodies behave in a certain way and feeling comes from that. Yes, that’s how laughter clubs work.

That belly laugh is the big event. It’s being in the moment. When was the last time you laughed so much, tears were streaming down your face and your stomach muscles got a good work out?

There’ve been some studies (aren’t there always?) about how our frequency of laughing declines with age. Young children laugh often and with their whole bodies. But adults do a sort of fake titter. The whole body is no longer engaged.

Most adults tend to get overly rigid. I expect this has to be social conditioning. This isn’t that surprising because we value being in the head more than being in the body, what can you expect? In Victorian times laugher was unseemly. Are we experiencing and epidemic of somberness today? We can be serious without being somber. I know you know that, but I wanted to say it anyway.

I’m not sure what’s changing with me, but something is. I was out walking the other day and got to thinking of this and that, you know how you do.

All of a sudden an amusing thought occurred to me. And there it was— the spontaneous belly laugh. It just welled up. I felt great. I do know that I was walking slowly. Is it fair to say that laughter is the embodiment of joy, or of being alive?

When I was younger, I remember seeing Fawlty Towers for the first time. I laughed so hard and for so long at that.

Are you still able to spontaneously belly laugh? When does it occur?

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
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This morning the missus and I got up early and went for a walk in the woods. In the two hours we were out, we only came upon one other human being. It was quiet.

I’d been thinking about some business projects that require me to come up with new ideas. Walking in the quiet allows ideas to surface. One idea that I jumped on when I got home was to set up a creativity blog. This is only day one of ‘Creativity?’ And, in true slow style, I shall not rush to post on it. However, you may be interested in looking at Sir Ken Robinson’s video on the subject.

I’ll be keeping up the slow blog here.

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
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