by Carl Honore
Then, one afternoon in late spring, everything changed. Jack wanted to stay at home and play in his room instead of going to his tennis lesson. His mother insisted he go. As they sped across west London, screeching round corners and surging through yellow lights to avoid being late, Jack fell quiet in the back seat. “I looked in the mirror, and he was fast asleep—and that’s when it hit me,” Nicola recalls. “I suddenly thought: ‘This is mad—I’m dragging him to something he doesn’t really want to go to. I’m going to burn out my own child.’”
That evening, the Barnes family gathered round the kitchen table to downsize Jack’s diary. They decided he should do no more than three extracurricular activities at a time. Jack chose soccer, swimming and drama. They also agreed to cut back on their scheduled weekend outings. As a result, Jack now has more time to potter around in the garden, meet friends in the nearby park and play in his room. On Saturdays, instead of collapsing exhausted into bed after supper, he now hosts sleepovers. On Sunday morning, he and a friend make pancakes and popcorn. Shifting down a gear did take some getting used to, at least for the parents. Nicola worried that Jack would be bored and restless, especially on weekends. Alex feared he would miss cricket and tennis. Jack, however, has blossomed on the lighter schedule. He is livelier, more talkative and has stopped biting his nails. His soccer coach thinks his passing is sharper. The head of his drama group feels Jack has more get-up-and-go. “I think he’s just enjoying everything about his life more,” says his mother. “I just wish we’d lightened his load sooner.”
Nicola feels closer to her son now that they spend more time just hanging out together. She also finds her own life is less rushed. All that shuttling from one activity to the next was stressful and time-consuming.
The Barneses are now planning to cut back on the mother of all extracurricular activities: television. Earlier, I described cities as giant particle accelerators. It is a metaphor that can just as easily apply to TV, especially for the young. Television accelerates children’s move into adulthood by exposing them to grown-up issues and turning them into consumers at a young age. Because kids watch it so much—up to four hours a day in the United States, on average—they have to rush to squeeze everything else into their schedules. In 2002, ten leading public health organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, signed a letter warning that watching too much television makes youngsters more aggressive. A number of studies suggest that children exposed to violent TV or computer games are more likely to be restless and unable to sit still and concentrate.
In classrooms around the world, where more and more kids are being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, teachers increasingly point the finger at the boob tube. Extreme visual speed on the small screen certainly has an effect on young brains. When Japanese TV broadcast a Pokémon video in 1997, the bright flashing lights triggered epileptic fits in nearly seven hundred children watching at home. To guard against lawsuits, software companies now attach health warnings to their games.
This explains why many families are saying enough is enough. In busy, wired homes around the world, parents are restricting their children’s access to the small screen—and finding that life is less frantic without it. To experience a TV-free zone firsthand, I arrange to visit Susan and Jeffrey Clarke, a busy forty-something couple who live with their two young children in Toronto. Until recently, the television was the centre of their household. Rooted like zombies in front of the screen, ten-year-old Michael and eight-year-old Jessica routinely lost track of time, and ended up rushing to avoid being late. Both children gobbled down meals to get back to the box.
After reading about the anti-TV movement, the Clarkes decided to give it a try. They went cold turkey, stowing their 27-inch Panasonic in a cupboard under the stairs. Once the initial protests died down, the results were amazing. Within a week, the children had covered the basement floor with mattresses and started putting together gymnastic routines with cartwheels and handstands. Like other TV-free families, the Clarkes suddenly found they had time on their hands, which helped take the rush out of daily life. Many of the hours once spent watching TV are now devoted to Slower pursuits—reading, playing board games, horsing around in the backyard, studying music or just chatting. Both children seem healthier and are doing better at school. Jessica finds it easier to get to sleep at night. Michael, who used to have trouble concentrating and reading, now devours books on his own.
On a recent Thursday evening, the Clarke household was enviably serene. Susan was cooking pasta in the kitchen. Michael was reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on a sofa in the living room. Beside him, Jeffrey flipped through the Globe and Mail. On the floor, Jessica was writing a letter to her grandmother.
The Clarkes are not as cloyingly virtuous as they sound. The TV set is now back in the living room, and the kids are allowed to watch the odd program. Jeffrey assures me that the house is often more chaotic than it looked on my visit. But cutting back on TV has changed the underlying tempo of family life from a frenetic prestissimo to a more dignified moderato. “There is definitely a calmness that wasn’t there before,” says Susan. “We still lead active, interesting lives. The difference is that we no longer rush around like headless chickens all the time.”
In a world obsessed with doing everything faster, though, some will find it easier than others to bring up their children in a Slow fashion. Some forms of deceleration come at a price not everyone can afford. You need money to send a child to a private school that takes a Slow approach to learning. To make the time for home education, at least one parent has to work less, which is not an option for every family. Nevertheless, many ways to put a child on the Slow track are free. Cutting back on TV or extracurricular activities, for instance, costs nothing.
Rather than cash, though, the main barrier to Slow child-rearing—indeed to Slow anything—is the modern mindset. The urge to fast-track kids still runs deep. Instead of welcoming official efforts to ease the workload in classrooms, many Japanese parents make their children spend even longer at local cram schools. Across the industrial world, parents and politicians remain in thrall to exam results.
Rescuing the next generation from the cult of speed means reinventing our whole philosophy of childhood, much as the Romantics did two centuries ago. More freedom and fluidity in education, more emphasis on learning as a pleasure, more room for unstructured play, less obsession with making every second count, less pressure to mimic adult mores. Grown-ups can certainly do their bit by curbing the urge to hyper-parent and by setting a Slow example in their own lives. None of these steps are easy to take. But the evidence is that taking them is well worth it.
Nicola Barnes is glad her son, Jack, no longer rushes around trying to do as much as he can with every single moment of the day. “It’s such an important lesson to learn, for children and adults,” she says. “Life is just better when you know how to slow down.”
CONCLUSION
FINDING THE TEMPO GIUSTO
The whole struggle of life is to some extent a struggle
about how slowly or how quickly to do each thing.
—STEN NADOLNY, AUTHOR OF
THE DISCOVERY OF SLOWNESS (1996)
IN 1898, MORGAN ROBERTSON published Futility, an eerily prescient novel about the folly of pursuing the transatlantic speed record at any cost. The story begins when a company unveils the largest cruise liner ever built, a “practically unsinkable” craft capable of travelling the high seas at full throttle in any weather. On its maiden voyage, though, the ship slices through another vessel. A witness to the accident decries the “wanton destruction of life and property for the sake of speed.” The name of the fictional ship was Titan. Fourteen years later, in 1912, the Titanic slammed into an iceberg, killing more than fifteen hundred people.
The sinking of the unsinkable Titanic had all the makings of a wake-up call to a world in thrall to speed. Many hoped the tragedy would force mankind to pause for
breath, to take a long hard look at the cult of acceleration and see that the time had come to slow down a little.
It was not to be. A century later, the world is still straining to do everything faster—and paying a heavy price for it. The toll taken by the hurry-up culture is well rehearsed. We are driving the planet and ourselves towards burnout. We are so time-poor and time-sick that we neglect our friends, families and partners. We barely know how to enjoy things any more because we are always looking ahead to the next thing. Much of the food we eat is bland and unhealthy. With our children caught up in the same hailstorm of hurry, the future looks bleak.
Yet all is not lost. There is still time to change course. Though speed, busyness and an obsession with saving time remain the hallmarks of modern life, a powerful backlash is brewing. The Slow movement is on the march. Instead of doing everything faster, many people are decelerating, and finding that Slowness helps them to live, work, think and play better.
But is the Slow movement really a movement? It certainly has all the ingredients that academics look for—popular sympathy, a blueprint for a new way of life, grassroots action. True, the Slow movement has no formal structure, and still suffers from low brand recognition. Many people slow down—working fewer hours, say, or finding time to cook—without feeling part of a global crusade. Yet every act of deceleration is grist to the mill.
Italy may be the closest thing the Slow movement has to a spiritual home. With its emphasis on pleasure and leisure, the traditional Mediterranean way of life is a natural antidote to speed. Slow Food, Slow Cities and Slow Sex all have Italian roots. Yet the Slow movement is not about turning the whole planet into a Mediterranean holiday resort. Most of us do not wish to replace the cult of speed with the cult of slowness. Speed can be fun, productive and powerful, and we would be poorer without it. What the world needs, and what the Slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. It means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up. One way to cultivate inner Slowness is to make time for activities that defy acceleration—meditation, knitting, gardening, yoga, painting, reading, walking, Chi Kung.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula for slowing down, no universal guide to the right speed. Each person, act, moment has its own eigenzeit. Some people are happy living at a speed that would send the rest of us to an early grave. Everyone must have the right to choose the pace that makes them happy. As Uwe Kliemt, the Tempo Giusto pianist, says, “The world is a richer place when we make room for different speeds.”
Of course, the Slow movement still faces some pretty daunting obstacles—not least our own prejudices. Even when we long to slow down, we feel constrained by a mixture of greed, inertia and fear to keep up the pace. In a world hardwired for speed, the tortoise still has a lot of persuading to do.
Critics dismiss the Slow movement as a passing fad, or as a fringe philosophy that will never go mainstream. Certainly, the call for less speed has not stopped the world’s acceleration since the Industrial Revolution. And many who embraced slowness in the 1960s and 1970s spent the 1980s and 1990s racing to catch up. When the global economy starts to roar again, or when the next dotcom-style boom comes along, will all the talk of slowing down go out the window as everyone rushes to make a quick buck? Don’t bet on it. More than any generation before us, we understand the danger and futility of constant acceleration and are more determined than ever to roll back the cult of speed. Demographics are also on the side of deceleration. Across the developed world, populations are aging, and as we get older most of us have one thing in common: slowing down.
The Slow movement has its own momentum. Saying no to speed takes courage, and people are more likely to take the plunge knowing they are not alone, that others share the same vision and are taking the same risks. The Slow movement provides strength in numbers. Every time a group like Slow Food or the Society for the Deceleration of Time makes headlines, it becomes a little easier for the rest of us to question speed. What’s more, once people reap the rewards of slowing down in one sphere of life they often go on to apply the same lesson in others. Alice Waters, founder of the celebrated Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, is a star of the Slow Food movement. In 2003, she began lecturing on the merits of Slow Schooling. People are connecting the dots at the grass roots level, too. After discovering the unhurried pleasures of Tantric sex, Roger Kimber cut back on his work schedule. For Claire Wood, giving up her high-powered job in insurance to make soap went hand in hand with home-educating her daughter, Beth. Using Chi Kung to slow down on the squash court taught business professor Jim Hughes to take his time on consulting jobs and in the classroom. Switching off her mobile in the evening inspired banker Jill Hancock to take up cooking. “Once you start challenging the go-go-never-stop mindset at work, you start challenging it everywhere,” she says. “You just want to go deeper into things, instead of just skimming along on the surface.”
That sense that something is missing from our lives underpins the global yearning for Slowness. Whether that “something” goes deeper than a better quality of life, however, remains an open question. Many find that slowing down has a spiritual dimension. But many others do not. The Slow movement is broad enough to accommodate both. In any case, the gap between the two may not be as wide as it seems. The great benefit of slowing down is reclaiming the time and tranquility to make meaningful connections—with people, with culture, with work, with nature, with our own bodies and minds. Some call that living better. Others would describe it as spiritual.
The Slow movement certainly implies a questioning of the untrammelled materialism that drives the global economy. This is why critics think we cannot afford it, or that slowing down will remain a lifestyle perk for the rich. It is true that some manifestations of the Slow philosophy—alternative medicine, pedestrianized neighbourhoods, free-range beef—do not fit every budget. But most do. Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free.
Nor is the Slow movement inimical to capitalism. On the contrary, it offers it a lifeline. In its current form, global capitalism forces us to manufacture faster, work faster, consume faster, live faster, no matter what the cost. By treating people and the environment as valuable assets, rather than as disposable inputs, a Slow alternative could make the economy work for us, rather than vice versa. Slow capitalism might mean lower growth, a tough sell in a world obsessed with the Dow Jones index, but the notion that there is more to life than maximizing GDP, or winning the rat race, is gaining currency, especially in richer nations, where more and more people are considering the high cost of their frenetic lives.
In our hedonistic age, the Slow movement has a marketing ace up its sleeve: it peddles pleasure. The central tenet of the Slow philosophy is taking the time to do things properly, and thereby enjoy them more. Whatever its effect on the economic balance sheet, the Slow philosophy delivers the things that really make us happy: good health, a thriving environment, strong communities and relationships, freedom from perpetual hurry.
Persuading people of the merits of slowing down is only the beginning, however. Decelerating will be a struggle until we rewrite the rules that govern almost every sphere of life—the economy, the workplace, urban design, education, medicine. This will take a canny mix of gentle persuasion, visionary leadership, tough legislation and international consensus. It will be a challenge, but it is crucial. Already there are grounds for optimism. Collectively, we know our lives are too frantic, and we want to slow down. Individually, more of us are applying the brakes and finding that our quality of life i
mproves. The big question now is when the individual will become the collective. When will the many personal acts of deceleration occurring across the world reach critical mass? When will the Slow movement turn into a Slow revolution?
To help the world reach that tipping point, each of us should try to make room for Slowness. A good place to start is by reassessing our relationship with time. Larry Dossey, the American doctor who coined the term “time-sickness,” helps patients beat the condition by teaching them to step out of time, using biofeedback, meditation or prayer to engineer “time exits.” By confronting the way the clock has ruled their lives, they are able to slow down. We can all learn from this. Try to think about time not as a finite resource that is always draining away, or as a bully to be feared or conquered, but as the benign element we live in. Stop living every second as if Frederick Taylor were hovering nearby, checking his stopwatch and tut-tutting over his clipboard.
If we become less neurotic about time, we can start putting the twenty-four-hour society to more sensible use. At the beginning of this book, I argued that a world open round the clock is a world that invites hurry. Give us the chance to do anything, any time, and we will pack our schedules to bursting. But the twenty-four-hour society is not intrinsically evil. If we approach it in a Slow spirit—doing fewer things, with less hurry—it can give us the flexibility we need to decelerate.