In Praise of Slow

by Carl Honore

  Tantra is not something you master in a weekend. It takes time. The basic exercises require practice—at the very least, my love muscle still needs work—and there are many more techniques to learn. But my first brush with Tantra suggests that, whatever you think about the New Age, it can open the door to better sex, deeper intimacy and self-awareness.

  To find out more about the sexual pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I speak to a number of graduates from Tantra workshops. Most give it rave reviews. The Kimbers are an affable middle-aged couple from Rickmansworth, just outside London. Cathy, fifty-two, does marketing for trade fairs; Roger, forty-eight, owns and runs an electrical engineering business that manufactures ventilation systems for large buildings. They have been married thirty years. As in many long-term relationships, sex slipped down the priority list as children came along—they have two sons—and work took off. The Kimbers were often too busy or too tired or too stressed for bedroom fireworks. When they did make love, it seldom lasted very long.

  In 1999, however, Cathy decided to make a change. She felt her whole life was racing along like a runaway locomotive, and she wanted to slow down. Tantra seemed like a good place to start, so she signed up for Lightwoman’s introductory workshop. As the weekend drew near, the Kimbers began to get cold feet. Roger, a down-to-earth type with a natural aversion to the airy-fairy, dreaded being lectured on chi and chakras. The prospect of taking part in the Awakening of the Senses filled Cathy with panic. How could she, a textbook Type-A personality, possibly sit still, doing nothing, for all that time? The Kimbers took a leap of faith, though, and the weekend turned out to be a revelation for them both. Roger was blown away by the streaming. And Cathy loved the Awakening of the Senses. “I felt so much sensual pleasure,” she says. “I came out of there floating on air, with an incredible feeling of peace.” The couple has since done four Tantric workshops.

  Along the way, their sex life has undergone a renaissance with a capital R. Now, at least one evening a week, they retreat upstairs to a small room set aside for Tantric trysts. One of the teachings of Tantra is to create a “sacred space” for sex, which can mean as little as using scents or coloured lights in the bedroom. The Kimbers’ room is a secular shrine decorated with mystical objects and personal mementoes—stone sculptures of guardian angels, favourite books, Tibetan bells, lots of candles, family photographs and a ceramic figurine made years ago by their younger son. A dreamcatcher hangs from the ceiling. In soft candlelight, and with essential oils burning, the Kimbers spend hours massaging and caressing each other, and breathing in unison. When they finally do make love, the earth is guaranteed to move. Both now experience deeper and more intense orgasms. Thanks to the relaxation, pelvic exercises and breathing techniques he learned through Tantra, Roger can extend his for two or three minutes. “It’s amazing,” he says, smiling. “You just don’t want it to stop.”

  Sex is not always a multi-hour affair in the Kimber household. Like other fans of Tantra, the couple still enjoys a quick fumble under the sheets. But even fast sex packs a bigger bang than it used to.

  Earth-shattering orgasms are just part of the payoff. A whole new world of tenderness and intimacy has opened up for the Kimbers. Snuggling together on the sofa in their front room, they look like a couple of newlyweds. “Tantra has added a lot of depth to our relationship,” says Roger. “Sex is more spiritual and from the heart now.” Cathy nods. “People can be married for twenty years and not really know each other because they are just skimming along the surface,” she says. “Through Tantra, Roger and I have really come to know each other in a profound way.”

  Before you rush off to sign up for a weekend workshop, though, remember that Tantra is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can inject fresh fizz into a relationship gone flat. But by forcing people to slow down and look deeply at themselves and their partners, it can also expose irreconcilable differences. Halfway through my workshop, one man dropped out. His wife told me he was storming around the house in tears, shouting that their relationship was ruined.

  Tim Dyer, a thirty-seven-year-old restaurant manager in Bristol, England, knows the feeling. In 2002, he and his fiancée, a high-flying product developer, attended a Tantra workshop. They had been together three years and wanted to kick-start their dwindling sex life before embarking on marriage. Instead of setting them on the path to the perfect orgasm, however, the workshop made it clear that their relationship was built on sand. Dyer felt uneasy looking deeply into his fiancée’s eyes. By the end of the weekend, the couple were quarrelling in hushed tones during exercises. A few weeks later, they broke up.

  Earlier, we heard Milan Kundera’s warning that people in the fast lane cannot be sure of anything, not even their own hearts. Dyer could not agree more. “I look back now, and I can see that we were both living such busy lives that we never had time to really notice that our relationship had gone pear-shaped,” he says. “What Tantra does is slow you down and make you aware of things. And I guess that when we slowed down we realized that we weren’t really the love of each other’s lives after all.” Relieved to have dodged a marriage that was destined for the divorce courts, Dyer is now single again. And he has learned from his mistakes. Armed with a little Tantric wisdom, he plans to make more time for the sensual and intimate side of any future relationship. “I’ve learned that the best sex is about making connections, and you can’t make real connections if you’re in a hurry,” he says. “The next time I fall for someone, I want that slowness, that awareness from the beginning.”

  If he sticks with it, Dyer may find that decelerating in the bedroom helps to bring slowness to other parts of his life. Tantra has certainly done that for the Kimbers. Cathy has mellowed and become more patient with the delays of daily life. Roger, meanwhile, has chosen to work fewer hours. With so much love and so many great orgasms to be had at home, he feels, not surprisingly, less inclined to spend long hours chained to his desk. “Work just doesn’t seem to matter so much any more,” he says. He has even started running his business along Slow lines. Having long prided itself on speed of delivery, his company is now less obsessed with filling orders as quickly as possible. Easing the strain on the workforce was one reason for the shift. Has the company fallen prey to quicker rivals? On the contrary, product standards have risen, and orders are still coming in. “Slowing down doesn’t have the disastrous results people think it does,” says Roger. “It can actually do some good. That does not mean we can’t turn on the gas when we have to, but we don’t have to all the time.”

  It should come as no surprise to hear a businessman drawing a link between work and love. Being married to the job takes a toll on our intimate relationships, but the harm also flows in the other direction. According to US research, employees with marital problems lose on average fifteen workdays a year, costing American companies nearly seven billion dollars a year in lost productivity. The solution put forward by the Slow movement is as simple as it is appealing: Spend less time working and more time indulging in slow sex.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WORK: THE BENEFITS OF WORKING

  LESS HARD

  Cannot the labourers understand that by over-working

  themselves they exhaust their own strength and that of

  their progeny, that they are used up and long before their

  time come to be incapable of any work at all, that

  absorbed and brutalized by this single vice they are no

  longer men but pieces of men, that they kill within

  themselves all beautiful faculties, to leave nothing alive

  and flourishing except the furious madness for work.

  —PAUL LAFARGUE, THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY (1883)

  THERE WAS A TIME, NOT SO LONG AGO, when mankind looked forward to a new Age of Leisure. Machines promised to liberate everyone from the drudgery of work. Sure, we might have to put in the odd shift at the office or factory, monitoring screens, twiddling dials, signing invoices, but the rest of the day would be
spent hanging out and having fun. With so much free time on our hands, words like “hurry” and “haste” would eventually fall out of the language.

  Benjamin Franklin was among the first to envision a world devoted to rest and relaxation. Inspired by the technological breakthroughs of the latter 1700s, he predicted that man would soon work no more than four hours a week. The nineteenth century made that prophecy look foolishly naive. In the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution, men, women and even children toiled for fifteen hours a day. Yet at the end of the nineteenth century, the Age of Leisure popped up once again on the cultural radar. George Bernard Shaw predicted that we would work two hours a day by 2000.

  The dream of limitless leisure persisted through the twentieth century. Dazzled by the magical promise of technology, the man in the street dreamed of a life spent lounging by the pool, waited on by robots that not only mixed a mean martini but also kept the economy ticking over nicely. In 1956, Richard Nixon told Americans to prepare for a four-day workweek in the “not too distant future.” A decade later, a US Senate subcommittee heard that by 2000 Americans would be working as little as fourteen hours per week. Even in the 1980s, some predicted that robotics and computers would give us all more free time than we would know what to do with.

  Could they have been more wrong? If we can be sure about anything in the twenty-first century, it is that reports of the death of work have been greatly exaggerated. Today, the Age of Leisure looks as feasible as the paperless office. Most of us are more likely to put in a fourteen-hour day than a fourteen-hour week. Work devours the bulk of our waking hours. Everything else in life—family and friends, sex and sleep, hobbies and holidays—is forced to bend around the almighty work schedule.

  In the industrialized world, the average number of hours worked began a steady decline in the middle of the 1800s, when six-day weeks were the norm. But over the last twenty years two rival trends have taken hold.

  While Americans work as much as they did in 1980, Europeans work less. By some estimates, the average American now puts in 350 hours more on the job per year than his European counterpart. In 1997, the United States supplanted Japan as the industrialized country with the longest working hours. By comparison, Europe looks like a slacker’s paradise. Yet even there the picture is mixed. To keep up with the fast-paced, round-the-clock global economy, many Europeans have learned to work more like Americans.

  Behind the statistical averages, the grim truth is that millions of people are actually working longer and harder than they want to, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries. One in four Canadians now racks up more than fifty hours a week on the job, compared to one in ten in 1991. By 2002, one in five thirty-something Britons was working at least sixty hours a week. And that is before one adds in the long hours we spend commuting.

  Whatever happened to the Age of Leisure? Why are so many of us still working so hard? One reason is money. Everyone needs to earn a living, but the endless hunger for consumer goods means that we need more and more cash. So instead of taking productivity gains in the form of extra time off, we take them in higher incomes.

  Technology, meanwhile, has allowed work to seep into every corner of life. In the age of the information superhighway, there is nowhere to hide from email, faxes and phone calls. Once you can tap into the company database from home, access the Internet from an airplane, or take a call from the boss at the beach, everyone is potentially on duty all the time. I know from experience that working from home can easily slide into working all the time. In a recent interview, Marilyn Machlowitz, the author of Workaholics (1980), claimed that in the twenty-first century the pressure to be “always-on” is universal: “Workaholics used to be the people who would work any time, anywhere. What has changed is that it has become the norm to be on call 24/7.”

  There is also a lot more to do in most jobs. After years of re-engineering and downsizing, companies expect employees to shoulder the workload left behind by their laid-off colleagues. With the fear of unemployment hanging over offices and factories, many people regard putting in long hours as the best way to prove their worth. Millions go to work even when too tired or ill to be effective. Millions more never take their full vacation entitlement.

  This is madness. While some people like to work long hours, and should be allowed to do so, it is wrong to expect everyone else to keep pace. Working too hard is bad for us and for the economy. A 2002 study carried out at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, found that men who work sixty hours a week are twice as likely to have a heart attack as men who put in forty hours. That risk is trebled for those who sleep less than five hours a night at least twice a week.

  Workplace stress is not all bad. In limited doses, it can concentrate the mind and boost productivity. But too much of it can be a one-way ticket to physical and mental breakdown. In a recent poll, more than 15% of Canadians claimed that job stress had driven them to the brink of suicide.

  Companies also pay a heavy price for imposing a long-hours culture. Productivity is notoriously hard to measure, but academics agree that overwork eventually hits the bottom line. It is common sense: we are less productive when we are tired, stressed, unhappy or unhealthy. According to the International Labour Organization, workers in Belgium, France and Norway are all more productive per hour than are Americans. The British clock up more time on the job than do most Europeans, and have one of the continent’s poorest rates of hourly productivity to show for it. Working less often means working better.

  Beyond the great productivity debate lies what may be the most important question of all: What is life for? Most people would agree that work is good for us. It can be fun, even ennobling. Many of us enjoy our jobs—the intellectual challenge, the physical exertion, the socializing, the status. But to let work take over our lives is folly. There are too many important things that need time, such as friends, family, hobbies and rest.

  For the Slow movement, the workplace is a key battlefront. When the job gobbles up so many hours, the time left over for everything else gets squeezed. Even the simple things—taking the kids to school, eating supper, chatting to friends—become a race against the clock. A surefire way to slow down is to work less. And that is exactly what millions of people around the world are seeking to do.

  Everywhere, and especially in the long-hours economies, polls show a yearning to spend less time on the job. In a recent international survey by economists at Warwick University and Dartmouth College, 70% of people in twenty-seven countries said they wanted a better work-life balance. In the United States, the backlash against workaholism is gathering steam. More and more blue-chip firms, from Starbucks to Wal-Mart, face lawsuits from staff allegedly forced to put in unpaid overtime. Americans are snapping up books that show how a more leisurely approach to work, and to life in general, can bring happiness and success. Recent titles include The Lazy Way to Success, The Lazy Person’s Guide to Success and The Importance of Being Lazy. In 2003, US campaigners for shorter working hours held the first national Take Back Your Time Day on October 24, the date when, according to some estimates, Americans have worked as much as Europeans do in a year.

  All over the industrial world, recruitment managers report that younger applicants have started asking questions that would have been unthinkable ten or fifteen years ago: Can I leave the office at a reasonable hour in the evening? Is it possible to trade income for more vacation time? Will I have control over my working hours? In interview after interview, the message is coming through loud and clear: we want to work, but we want to have a life, too.

  Women are especially eager for work-life balance. Recent generations have been reared to believe it is their right and duty to have it all: family, career, house, rewarding social life. But “having it all” has turned out to be a poisoned chalice. Millions of women have recognized their own frazzled selves in the American collection of essays The Bitch in the House and in I Don’t Know How She Does It, Allison Pearson’s bestselling novel about a working mother st
ruggling to run a hedge fund and a home. Fed up with trying to be “superwoman,” women are leading the charge to renegotiate the rules of the workplace. Attitudes are changing. At smart dinner parties, alpha females are now just as likely to boast about the length of their maternity leave as the size of their bonus. Even high flyers with no kids can be heard advocating a four-day workweek.

  Janice Turner, a Guardian columnist, recently noted that taking the Slow road can be bittersweet for the modern woman: “How cruel for a generation of women educated to succeed and fill every hour with purposeful activity to discover that happiness isn’t, after all, about being the fastest and busiest. What awful irony that contentment, more often than not, is about slowing down: taking pleasure in a bedtime story, not skipping pages to phone New York.”

  Everywhere, vote-hungry politicians are leaping on the work-life bandwagon. In 2003, the Parti Québécois in Canada proposed a four-day workweek for parents of young children. Whether such promises ever reach the statute books remains to be seen. Many politicians, as well as companies, simply pay lip service to work-life balance. Yet the fact that they bother to do so at all hints at a cultural sea change.