Praising slowness Carl Honore
what I’d like to start off with is an
observation which is that if I’ve
learned anything over the last year it’s
that the the supreme irony of publishing
a book about slowness is that you have
to go around promoting it really fast I
seem to spend most of my time these days
you know zipping from city to city
Studio to studio interview to interview
serving up the book and Rudy tiny
bite-size chunks because everyone these
days wants to know how to slow down but
but they want to know how to slow down
really quickly so so I did a spot on CNN
the other day where I actually spent
more time in makeup than I did talking
on air and I think that that that’s not
really surprising though is it because
that’s kind of the world that we we live
in now a world stuck in fast-forward a
world obsessed with speed with doing
everything faster with cramming more and
more into less and less time every
moment of the day feels like a race
against the clock to borrow a phrase
from Carrie Fisher which is in my bio
there I’ll just toss it out again these
days even instant gratification takes
too long and if you think about how we
try to make things better what do we do
well we speed them up don’t worry so you
know we used to dial and now we speed
dial we used to read now we speed read
we used to walk now we speed walk and of
course we used to date and now we speed
date and even things that are by their
very nature slow we try and speed them
up too so I was in New York recently and
I walked past a gym that had an
advertisement in the window for a new
course a new evening course and it was
for you guessed it speed yoga so this is
the perfect solution for time-starved
professionals who want to you know
salute the Sun but only want to give
over about 20 minutes to it these are
sort of the extreme examples in there
and they’re amusing and go to laugh at
but there’s a very serious point and I
think that in the headlong dash of daily
life we we often lose sight of the
damage that this Roadrunner form of
living does to us we’re so marinated in
the culture of speed that we we almost
fail to notice the toll it takes on
every aspect of our lives on our health
our diet our work our relationships in
the environment and our community and
sometimes it takes a wake-up call
doesn’t it to to alert us to the fact
that we’re hurrying through our lie
instead of actually living them that
we’re living the fast life instead of
the good life and I think for many
people that wake-up call takes the form
of an illness you know a burnout or
eventually the body says I can’t take it
anymore
and throws in the towel or maybe a
relationship goes up in smoke because we
have another time or the patience or the
tranquility to be with the other person
to listen to them my wake-up call came
when I started reading bedtime stories
to my son and I found that at the end of
the day I would go into his room and I
just couldn’t slow down you know I’d be
speed reading The Cat in the Hat
I’d be you know I be skipping lines here
paragraphs there sometimes a whole page
and of course my little boy knew the
book inside out so we would quarrel and
what should have been the most relaxing
the most intimate the most tender moment
of the day when a dad sits down to read
to his son became instead this kind of
gladiatorial battle of wills a clash
between his speed and my speed and his
slowness and this went on for some time
until I caught myself scanning a
newspaper article with time-saving tips
for fast people and one of them made
reference to a series of books called
the one-minute bedtime story
and I I can by wynt saying those words
now but my first reaction the time was
very different my first reflex was to
say hallelujah yeah what a great idea
this is exactly what I’m looking for to
speed up bedtime even more but
thankfully a light bulb went on over my
head and my next reaction was very
different and I I took a step back and I
thought whoa you know has it really come
to this am I really in such a hurry that
I’m prepared to fob off my son with a
sound bite at the end of the day and I
put away the newspaper and I was getting
on a plane and I sat there and I did
something I hadn’t done for a long time
which was I did nothing I just fought I
fought long and hard and by the time I
got off that plane I decided I wanted to
do something about it I wanted to
investigate this whole Roadrunner
culture and what it was doing to me and
to everyone else and I had two questions
in my head the first was how did we get
so fast and the second is is it possible
or even desirable to slow down now if
you think about how our world got so
accelerated the usual suspects rear
their heads you think of you know
urbanization consumerism the workplace
technology but I think if you cut
those forces you get to what might be
the deeper driver the the nub of the
question which is how we think about
time itself in other cultures time is
cyclical it’s seen as moving in great
unhurried circles it’s always renewing
and refreshing itself whereas in the
West time is linear it’s a finite
resource it’s always draining away you
either use it or lose it
time is money as Benjamin Franklin said
and I think what that that does to us
psychologically is it it creates an
equation time is scarce so what do we do
well well we speed up don’t we we try
and do more and more with less and less
time we turn every moment of every day
into a race to the finish line a finish
line incidentally that we never reach
but a finish line nonetheless and I
guess that the question is is it
possible to break free from that mindset
and thankfully the answer is yes because
what I discovered when I began looking
around that there is a global backlash
against this culture that tells us that
faster is always better and that busier
is best right across the world people
are doing the unthinkable they’re
slowing down and finding that although
conventional wisdom tells you that if
you slow down you’re roadkill the
opposite turns out to be true that by
slowing down at the right moments people
find that they do everything better they
eat better they make love better they
exercise better they work better if they
live better and in this kind of cauldron
of moments and places and acts of
deceleration lie what a lot of people
now refer to as the International slow
movement now if you’ll permit me a small
act of hypocrisy I’ll just give you a
very quick overview of what some this
what’s going on inside the slow movement
if you think of food many of you will
have heard of the slow food movement
started in Italy but has spread across
the world and now has a hundred thousand
members in 50 countries and it’s driven
by a very simple and sensible message
which is that we get more pleasure and
more health from our food when we
cultivate cook and consume it at a
reasonable pace I think also the
explosion of the organic farming
movement and the Renaissance of farmers
market is another or other illustration
of the fact that people are desperate to
get away from eating and cooking and
cultivating their food on an industrial
timetable they want to get back to
slower rhythms and out of the slow food
movement has grown something called the
slow cities movement which has started
in Italy but has spread right across
Europe and Beyond and in this towns
begin to rethink how they organize the
urban landscape so that people are
encouraged to to slow down and smell the
roses and connect with one another so
they might curb traffic or put in a park
bench or some green space and in some
ways these changes add up to more than
the sum of their parts because I think
when a slow city becomes officially a
slow city it’s kind of like a
philosophical declaration it’s saying to
the rest of the world
and to the people in that town that we
believe that in the 21st century
slowness has a role to play in medicine
I think a lot of people are deeply
disillusioned with the kind of quick fix
mentality you find in conventional
medicine and millions of them around the
world are turning to complementary and
alternative forms of medicine which tend
to tap into sort of slower gentler more
holistic forms of healing
now obviously the jury is out on many of
these complementary therapies and I
personally doubt that the coffee enema
will ever you know gain mainstream
approval but other treatments such as
acupuncture and massage and even just
relaxation clearly have some kind of
benefit and blue-chip medical colleges
everywhere are starting to study these
things to find out how they work and
what we might learn from them sex
there’s an awful lot of fast sex around
isn’t there I was coming to Ottawa nope
no pun intended then I was making my way
let’s say slowly to Oxford and I went
through a newsagent and I saw a magazine
a men’s magazine and it’s set on the
front how to bring your partner to
orgasm in 30 seconds so you know even
sex is on a stopwatch these days now I
you know I I like a quickie as much as
the next person but I think that there’s
an awful lot to be gained from slow sex
from slowing down in the bedroom you
know you tap into that those deeper sort
of you know psychological emotional
spiritual currents and you got a better
orgasm with
build up you to get more bang for your
buck let’s say I mean the pointer
sisters said it most eloquently didn’t
they when they sang the praises of a
lover with a slow hand now we all
laughed at sting a few years ago when he
went tantric but you fast forward a few
years and now you find couples of all
ages flocking to workshops or maybe just
on their own in their own bedrooms
finding ways to put on the brakes and
have better sex and of course in Italy
where I mean Italians always seem to
know where to find their pleasure
they’ve launched an official slow sex
movement the workplace right across much
of the world
I mean North America being a notable
exception working hours have been coming
down and Europe is an example of that
and people people finding that their
quality of life improves as they’re
working less and also that their hourly
productivity goes up now clearly there
are problems with the 35 hour work week
in France too much too soon too rigid
but other countries in Europe notably
the Nordic countries are showing that
it’s possible to have a kick-ass economy
without being a workaholic and Norway
Sweden Denmark and Finland now ranked
among the top six most competitive
nations on earth and they work the kind
of hours that would make the average
American weep with envy and if you go
beyond sort of the the country level
down at the the micro company level more
and more companies now are realizing
that they need to allow their staff
either to work fewer hours or just to
unplug to take a lunch break or to go
sit in a quiet room to switch off their
BlackBerry’s and laptops you at the back
mobile phones
during the workday or on the weekend so
that they have time to recharge and to
for the brain to slide into that kind of
creative mode of thought it’s not just
though these days adults who were
overworked though is it as children -
I’m 37 and my childhood ended in the mid
80s and I look at kids now and I’m just
amazed by the way they race around with
more homework more tutoring more
extracurriculars than we would ever have
conceived of a generation ago and some
of the most heart-rending emails that I
get on my website are actually from
adolescents hovering on the edge of
burnout pleading with me to write to
their parents
to help them slow down to help them get
off this full-throttle treadmill but
thankfully there is a backlash there in
parenting as well and you’re finding
that you know towns in the United States
are now banding together and banning
extracurriculars on a particular day of
the month so that people can decompress
and have some family time and slow down
homework is another thing there are
homework bans springing up all over the
developed world in schools which had
been piling on the homework for years
and now they’re discovering that less
can be more
so there was a case up in Scotland
recent they were a fee paying high
achieving private school band homework
for everyone under the age of 13 and the
high achieving parents freaked out and
said what do you know our kids our fault
the headmaster said no no your children
need to slow down at the end of the day
and just this last month the exam
results came in and in math science
marks went up 20% on average last year
and I think what’s very revealing is
that the elite universities who are
often cited as the reason that people
drive their kids and hothouse them so
much are starting to notice the caliber
of students coming to them is falling
these kids have wonderful marks they
have Seavey’s jammed with
extracurriculars to the point that would
make your eyes water but they lack spark
they lack the ability to think
creatively and outside the blade they
don’t know how to dream and so what
these Ivy League schools and Oxford and
Cambridge and so on are starting to send
a message to parents and students that
they need to put on the brakes a little
bit and in Harvard for instance they
send out a letter to undergraduates
front freshmen telling them that they’ll
get more out of life and more out of
Harvard if they if they put on the
brakes if they’d if they do less but
give time to things the time that things
need to enjoy them to savor them and
even if they sometimes do nothing at all
and that letter is called very revealing
I think slow down with an exclamation
mark on the end so wherever you look the
the message it seems to me is the same
that less is very often more that slower
is very often better but that’s said of
course it’s it’s not that easy to slow
down is it I mean you heard that I got a
speeding ticket while I was researching
my book on the benefits of slowness and
that’s true but that’s that’s not all of
it I was actually all route to a dinner
held by slow food at the time
and and if that’s not shaming enough I
got that ticket in Italy and if any of
you have ever driven on an Italian
Highway you have a pretty good idea of
how fast I was going but why is it so
hard to slow down I think there are
various reasons one is that the speed is
fun you know speed is sexy at all that
adrenaline rush it’s it’s hard to give
it up I think there’s a kind of
metaphysical dimension that speed
becomes a way of rolling ourselves off
from the bigger deeper questions we fill
our heads with distraction with busyness
so that we don’t have to ask am i well
am i happy are my children growing up
right are politicians making good
decisions on my behalf
another reason I think perhaps even the
most powerful reason why we find it hard
to slow down is the cultural taboo that
we’ve erected against slowing down the
slow is a dirty word in our culture it’s
a byword for lazy slacker for being
somebody who gives up you know he’s a
bit slow it’s actually synonymous with
being with being stupid I guess what the
the slow move for the purpose of the
slow movement or where this main goal
really is to tackle that to boo and to
say that but yes sometimes slow is not
the the answer that there is such a
thing as bad slow you know that I mean I
got stuck on the m25 which is the Ring
Road round London recently and spent
three and a half hours there and I can
tell you that’s really bad slow but the
new idea the sort of revolutionary idea
of the slow movement is that there is
such a thing as good slow too and good
slow is you know taking the time to eat
a meal with your family with the TV
switched off or taking the time to look
at a problem from all angles in the
office to make the best decision at work
or even simply just taking the time to
slow down and savor your life now one of
the things that I found most uplifting
about all of this stuff that’s happened
around the book since it came out is is
the reaction to it and I knew that when
when my book on slowness came out it
would be welcomed by the New Age brigade
but it’s also been taken up with great
gusto by the corporate world in a sort
of business press but also you know big
companies and leadership organizations
because people at the top of the chain
people like you I think are starting to
realize that there’s too much speed in
the system there’s too much busyness and
it’s time to find
or get back to that lost part of
shifting gears another encouraging sign
I think is that it’s not just in the
developed world that this idea is being
taken up and in the developing world in
countries that are on the verge of
making that leap into first world state
as China Brazil Thailand Poland and so
on these countries are have embraced the
idea of the slow movement many many
people in them and there’s a there’s
debate going on in their media on the
streets because I think they’re looking
at the West and they’re saying well we
like that aspect of what your you’ve got
but we’re not so sure about that
so all of that said is it I guess is it
possible that’s really the main question
before us today is it possible to slow
down and and I I’m happy to be able to
say to you that the answer is a
resounding yes and I present myself as
as exhibit a a kind of reformed and
rehabilitated speedo holic I still love
speed you know I live in London and I
work as a journalist and I enjoy the
buzz and the busyness and the adrenaline
rush that comes from both of those
things I play squash and ice hockey -
very fast sports and I wouldn’t give
them up for the world but I’ve also over
the last year or so got in touch with my
inner tortoise and what that means is
that I don’t I no longer overload myself
gratuitous Lane my default mode is no
longer to be a Russia holic I no longer
hear times winged chariot drawing near
or at least not as much as I did before
I can I can actually hear it now because
I see my time is ticking off and the
upshot of all of that is that I actually
feel a lot happier healthier more
productive than I ever have I feel like
I’m living my life rather than actually
just racing through it and press the
most important measure of the success of
this is that I feel that my
relationships are a lot deeper richer
stronger and and for me the I guess the
litmus test for whether this would work
and what it would mean was always going
to be bedtime stories because that’s
sort of where
the journey began and there to the news
is is rosy I you know the end of the day
I go into my son’s room I don’t wear a
watch I switch off my computer so I
can’t hear the email pinging into the
basket and I just slow down to his pace
and and we read and because children
have their own tempo and internal clock
they don’t do quality time you schedule
10 minutes for them to open up to you
they need you to move at their rhythm I
find that 10 minutes into a story you
know my son will suddenly say you know
something happened in the playground
today that really bothered me and will
go off and have a conversation on that
and I now find that bedtime stories used
to be a kind of a box unlike to-do list
something that I’d read it because it
was so slow and I had to get through it
quickly it’s become my reward at the end
of the day something I really I really
cherish and and I have a kind of
Hollywood ending to my talk this
afternoon which goes a little bit like
this a few months ago I was getting
ready to go on a another book tour and I
had my bags packed I was downstairs by
the front door and I was waiting for a
taxi my son came down the stairs and he
he made a card for me he was carrying it
he’d gone and stapled two cards very
like these together and put a sticker of
his favorite character Tintin on the
front and he said to me where he handed
his me and and I read it it said to
Daddy love Benjamin and I thought oh
that’s that’s really sweet you know is
that a good luck on the book tour card
and he said no no no daddy this is a
card for being the best story reader in
the world and I thought yeah you know
this slowing down thing really does work
thank you very much
you