Slow down now blog

We slow people try to develop patience. Patience and slow go together like, well, things that go together well. Patience is a virtue, but it’s also a gift.

Thanks to sugar mouse in the rain for this on his blog.

“Herbert A. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labour to master any field.”

I’m not sure that heavy labor is necessary, but perhaps persistence is. To be patient is to be kind, and to be patient with yourself is to be kind to yourself. Can we be kind to others if we aren’t to ourselves? I don’t thinks so. Patience is the slow way. Of course, like pretty much everything, it’s easier said than done. Let’s revisit this one.

Any thoughts about patience?

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
3 Comments »

My bamboo shirt arrived today. It’s not a shirt made out of bamboo. That would be uncomfortable. No, this is a patterned bamboo Hawaiian shirt. It’s from Mad Gringo, a commentator on this site and a man with a deep commitment to slow.

As soon as I put it on I could feel its relaxing effect. In fact, I had to lie down on the sofa with a cup of tea to really appreciate how slow it made me feel. You just can’t go rushing about in a shirt like this.

Although, come to think of it, I had better not wear it to Trader Joe’s where all the staff are clad in Hawaiian shirts. I just might get asked on which isle the Latvian organic ice cream is, or the whereabouts of the two-dollar 1921 Chateauneuf du Pape.

So there really are clothes to help you go slow. Who would have thought it? I can’t write any more with this shirt on. I need a nap.

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
3 Comments »

I like peace and quiet to practice my early-morning Shibashi qigong routine.

I was reading The Lost Art of Healing, Practicing Compassion in Medicine, by Bernard Lown, and came across the three doctors: doctor quiet, doctor diet, and doctor laughter.

At one time, these three doctors may have been the only resource. As medical technology became so successful, they are now largely ignored. Hence, the ‘Lost Art’ in Lown’s title. Time is said to be the great healer and the body knows what to do if you just give it time and treat it right.

Your doctor is more likely to prescribed pills than a list of hilarious novels or plays. It’s unlikely to have your doctor recommend complete rest in some mountain spa, or to travel to a more accommodating climate for a number of years. Were these prescriptions only available in fiction? Possibly.

To my mind, it’s a great pity so much emphasis is on productivity. It seems such a Calvinistic perspective. The idea of a healthy person goes beyond the ability to produce something. Taking medicine may be a case of life and death. Clearly many lives are made better through drugs. But it surprises me that there is an expectation for the middle-aged to be using drugs. I don’t have anything against drugs. In fact, I am all for them in the right context and used appropriately.

Prevention is always the best cure. For me, a certain amount of quiet is necessary. It just feels healing. Sadly, quiet is in short supply.

Not long after I came to live in California. I rented a car and took off for an exploratory drive. I drove from San Francisco to Death Valley and up spectacular highway 395 where the mountains drop precipitously to the desert floor, over the Tioga Pass through Yosemite and back home.

When I got out of the car in Death Valley it was quiet. It was so quiet that I thought I heard noises when I walked. Was someone following me? I stopped and the noise stopped. I walked and the noise started. This was getting eerie. Eventually I realized this noise was my shirt sleeve scraping against my shirt. I had never experienced that sort of quiet. I have heard that there were people in the Sudan, elderly people, who had no hearing loss at all.

But quiet is a thing to be either terrified by or to be deeply satisfying. When it’s quiet, you hear the blood pumping in your veins, you hear your heart. It seems that you are making the very devil of a racket by breathing. Yet after a while you start to notice all sorts of things. Stillness is elusive and maybe an impossibility.

Where I live the early morning is the quiet time. I appreciate it. I step outside the door and slowly do my gigong (Chi-Gung) exercises. It’s my preferred slow way to start the day.

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
7 Comments »

Thank you to Eileen from the UK who sent this to me this morning. It’s with great appreciation I post it here with permission:

Seriously speaking, I agree with and practise all that is in your manifesto, so to speak.

I have two mottos in life which I follow slowly and carefully. One is -maximum efficiency with minimal effort.

The other is just as important, if not more so and not ungermane. In Latin: suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, gentle in the method, resolute in the action.

To express myself even more seriously, I feel very strongly about all your philosophy, having just lost a darling brother who lived a driven life and his body wore out too soon. Too many of my friends live this similar life and have constant accidents and illnesses.

I am 83 and have always followed all your precepts. Keep up this good work. I am sending news of you to all my family and friends. Eileen.

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
1 Comment »

[Thank you to Dan, who writes the Art of Tea for this guest post]

I have had the honour bestowed upon me of writing a “guest post” for the Slow Down Now blog. In respect of such, I have…

…thought about writing about the Belbroughton Scarecrow Weekend.

…thought about writing about how someone once told me that the reason angels can fly is because they take life lightly.

…thought about writing about the simple delights of making jam.

…thought… isn’t it good to sometimes not think?

…to find oneself on a path between fields of crops and to stop and lean on a gate and realise what a beautiful, warm, sunny, crisp autumnal day it is…

…to watch a horse grazing idly on a nearby hillside…

…to observe the gentle circling of owls and ravens against the backdrop of clear blue sky and wispy cotton wool clouds…

…to smile at the butterflies frolicking in the undergrowth…

…to pick blackberries…

…to say hello to the squirrels and voles and robbins who cross one’s path…

…to experience…

…to just be…

…to switch off one’s mind, even one’s imagination, and to be totally absorbed in the present moment…

As a writer, I have a tendency to overthink, to philosophize on every tiny nuance of existence, to search for the meaning in everything I experience, to place all of life into a contextual narrative. But sometimes…

…isn’t it best just to forget?

…to live outside one’s thoughts?

…to slow down…

…to the point where…

…one just…

…stops?

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
2 Comments »

According to an article on Reuters, women find well-mannered men more attractive. There is a new guide to chivalry for men from Debrett’s, the British arbiter of taste.

Speed leads to impatience and rudeness. I want a more civilized world, a world in which manners, consideration for others, and politeness count.

I admit that this SLOW DOWN NOW thing is an ideal. I found myself in the morally reprehensible state of multi-tasking the other day. Sometimes life gets the better of you. But at least I know to be slow.

A slow lifestyle is more polite. Do you rush to go through a door first, or slow down, and take time to stand aside and let someone else go through? Do you let other cars in front of you when driving? When I do this, I often get a friendly wave.

What may be sexy about slow is that it makes time to be considerate of others.

Trying to do too much is the culprit. If I’m thinking of things I must do, I’m not even present. Impatience adds to the sum of minor frustrations that builds up into full-blown grumpiness. The good news is slowing down helps nip grumpiness in the bud.

Look around. You can see the furrowed brow everywhere.

If we are going to treat each other better, we need to slow down. After all, the slow movement is about being more considerate and civilized. Slow down and be more attractive. It seems like a sound idea, but it’s easier said than done.

Don’t you think so?

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
8 Comments »

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.

Tags: Talk Back by Christopher
5 Comments »

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
13 Comments »

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.

###

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?

###

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
2 Comments »

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
5 Comments »