Slow down now blog

I enjoyed reading a well-written perspective on time, boredom, regret, and the appreciation of time to oneself from Mark, at Soul Shelter. His post is about Charles Lamb’s (1775-1834) book The Superannuated Man.

I’ve always valued unstructured time. I was twenty when I aimlessly wandered around Western Europe for several months. And I mean aimless as a good thing. I had no agenda, little money, but lots of time. It was an open-ended adventure.

I remember seeing exhausted vacationing Americans with Eurail passes hell-bent on “seeing” the sights in as short a time as possible. They had a different concept of time from me. Valuing time has had its costs, but unlike Lamb’s regret for a life confined to a desk, I feel the cost has been so worthwhile.

Before reading Mark’s post, I was only aware of Charles Lamb through his quotes. His advice to his contemporary, Coleridge: “Cultivate simplicity.” Despite Lamb’s life of drudgery, he had his moments of levity:

“If ever I marry a wife,

I’ll marry a landlord’s daughter,

For then I may sit in the bar,

And drink cold brandy and water.”

Lamb suffered time poverty. With only one day a week off and one week a year to recuperate, he had almost no leisure until he reached 50. After the initial shock, he wasn’t sure what to do with his leisure when it arrived. What a shame to look forward to retirement only to be disappointed when it arrives. Slowing down is a skill that needs to be cultivated if it is to be enjoyed.

I’ve added The Superannuated Man, to my book list, but I have no idea when I’ll find the time to read it.

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A Philosophy of Boredom is an interview with author Lars Svendsen about his book of the same title from To the best of our knowledge. Svendsen agrees with Friedrich Nietzsche, that if we fly from boredom, we fly from ourselves. I’ve listened to some of this interview, and I’ll catch the rest later. You’ll need Real Media Player to listen.

Svendsen says that boredom is a sort of timeless hellish place of being in a moment that will never end. But this same sense of timelessness, of being here and now, can be an ecstatic meditative state. So what makes this state heaven or hell?

The whole clip from To the best of our knowledge is about doing nothing. An apt subject.

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I’d like to thank my friend Matthew for sending this article from the Boston Globe.
I asked a question on LinkedIn recently about what boredom felt like.

Some people who answered could not admit to feeling bored at all. Everyone is different, but surely not experiencing boredom would somehow be less than human. Don’t we all feel bored at times? Just the mention of PowerPoint can sap my energy and bring on a state of ennui.

What exactly is boredom? The online dictionary doesn’t help with much of a description, but boredom does seem to be an unpleasant state.

I usually equate boredom with fatigue, not that pleasant state of still awareness that you can develop from slowing down. I’ve been thinking much about opposites lately. Once you invoke a thought or an idea, you also bring into being its opposite. There can be no yin without yang, no wet without dry, no short without tall. I think it’s necessary to be bored just like you can’t continue to breathe in, you have to breathe out.

For me, I don’t think I am ever bored without feeling tired. Like mood, there is always movement. Either that mood is becoming stronger or weaker.

The article mentions Hallowell’s book CrazyBusy. Although I haven’t read it (and probably won’t), here is part of one review:

This book has some good advice about avoiding multitasking when you need to do quality work. I like its basic attitude about seeing our current craziness as an opportunity. I enjoyed the discussion of slow processors and how they contribute to human progress. I think Hallowell is a little too optimistic about what technology can do to improve human life…

And the reason for few posts on this site is I am writing a book about a slow world that takes place in a fictional village near Oxford. There is a fair amount of tea drinking and golf in this book that speaks of Marion Crumpetworthy the barmaid at the Maiden’s Arms, a cursed golf course that is so horrible it only appears once a year, the healthy Amanda Bassington, the smug Grant Manly, Lady Cassandra Dribble, and how Lady Fiona plays a round with the vicar of Warmsly after Lord Alistair went missing.

Make sure you are on the slow reminder list and I’ll let you know when it’s finished.

Yours in slowness,

Christopher

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Now slow is not lazy but this book is worthwhile.

Gini, Al. The Importance of Being Lazy: In praise of play, leisure and vacations., Routledge, 2003, New York

This well-researched book is a great place to start to learn about the slow lifestyle. Al Gini is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He’s also a business consultant. He previously explored a mixture of business, work, and philosophy, in his book My Job, My Self. Be warned, he describes himself as addicted to work.

The Importance of Being Lazy is about personal identity in culture. Our most frequent response to the question, “who am I”, is to say what we do for a living. The book is about who we are and what we do when not at work. Professor Gini’s own university has only a few books on leisure but thousands on work, jobs, and careers. We value work, we don’t value leisure.

If vacations are a project of self-definition, then what does it mean to not even take vacations? Vacation starvation becomes a malady. The consequences, as Josef Pieper pointed out, is the destruction of culture. The idea of leisure time was to refresh and renew to have a life outside of work. But market forces have largely been against this.

Adam Smith said, “Consumption is the sole purpose of all production.” Al Gini says, “To Shop is to be. “ Our culture has degenerated from a society based around people to those around things.”

There are five problem areas:
1.Lack of Self Development. Without adequate time and energy we become passive consumers of entertainment. This makes us dull.
2. Lack of Autonomy. Time away from constraints and conformity of work is necessary to build a more authentic sense of self. Spending all our time at work makes us compliant, and often against our own best interests.
3. Effects of Social Life. Less time means more superficial interactions with others. Lack of social involvement degrades our social environment. We are too busy to be courteous. We are too busy for civic involvement.
4. Positional Competition: In other words, “Keeping up with the Joneses.” Our focus is on the superficial. We self identify through our buying habits.
5. Cognitive and Valuational Confusion. You might expect a title like this from an academic (and a word like valuational!). However, the book is wonderfully free of academic writing.

What does Professor Gini mean? Advertisers create discontent by holding up impossible promises and standards to which consumers aspire.

Professor Gini cites a host of thinkers including, Hegel, Kipling, William James, Marcuse, and Aristotle. My own favorite is Mark Twain, “I do not like work even when someone else does it.”

We need to find a balance between work and leisure. We are responsible for at least some of the choices we make. The notes are a wonderful resource for further reading.

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It’s National Handwriting Day.

The handwriting police race up to you, there is a screech of tires and the from the bull horn you hear: “Step away from the keyboard!”

Or at least that’s how I imagine it. But it really is National Handwriting Day. Handwriting may be a lost slow art. But even those who scrawl can enjoy the sensuality of pencil (in my case) or pen on paper.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I like my handwriting these days. And it’s getting better. It used to be appalling, so I won’t show you an example of that. Even I couldn’t read it. And the real reason for my previous obfuscating scrawl was that I was a nervous speller. Bad spelling was a source of keen embarrassment to me. I was even caned for not learning my spelling list as a schoolboy. It didn’t help. In fact it made me more nervous.

It’s easy to overcome bad spelling with software. And for me, the computer has improved my spelling as I now have the confidence to practice handwriting every day.

In France employers take handwriting seriously. They believe that you can make assumptions about people by the way they write. This maybe true, but like any test, be it Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, or any other system, the danger is to categorize and then only react to the label.

Handwriting does seem to be heritable. I see influences of my mother’s and father’s handwriting. In those days it was important to have an elegant hand. That was unless you were a doctor. I believe they had special illegibility classes for them in medical school.

My parents’ generation used to write, and calculate by hand. Handwriting mattered. It is a art, and like most art it’s a practice that improves over time. Handwriting has an immediacy that the keyboard doesn’t have. It’s authentic and expressive. Writing is drawing. It’s more somatically connected.

Even though having a handwriting day is probably a commercial idea, in these fast-paced times, receiving a handwritten letter or note can make a difference. It’s certainly a demonstration of slowing down.

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Thanks to adbusters for updating their wonderful animation again this year.

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This piece started as posting for creativity and action, with which to stimulate a conversation about resistance, that anti-creative force that stops us from doing authentic creative acts.

But you know how it is, one thing leads to another and it is now on the main site as Muse and Anti-Muse (Resistance is futile).

Starting something new is tough. And that’s what this essay is about. How about you? What is your muse like? Are you slow enough to see her? Or maybe you have a gentleman muse.

Beware of the anti-muse, she who distracts you and leaves you exhausted in a state of pique.

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