Go with the slow
Don’t feel like you always have to be busy — a bit of boredom’s good for you, Slow Movement advocate says
Carl Honoré has been called the world’s leading evangelist of the Slow Movement, which advocates living life slower, even embracing boredom rather than the cult of busyness.
Honoré, 47, lives in London, England, one of the world’s busiest cities, but was raised in Edmonton.
Honoré left in 1988, getting a degree in history and Italian from Edinburgh University (he was born in Scotland, but his family immigrated to Canada when he was a baby).
After working with street children in Brazil, Honoré became a journalist and reported from Europe and South America for publications such as The Economist, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle and the Globe and Mail.
He published his first book, In Praise of Slowness, in 2004 and has since published two more on the topic. Honoré’s TED talk on the issue in 2005 has garnered close to 1.4 million views.
Today he talks to us about living a slower life.
London makes Edmonton seem like a small town. Speak about how living in a fast-paced city affects a person.
Cities act as giant particle accelerators if you let them.
They attract busy, ambitious, dynamic people and then they make you more dynamic and busy because you’re all stuffed together in a small space competing for space, time, money, light.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t resist that temptation to do everything in fast-forward.
When people talk about slowing down or embracing this slow idea, the first reaction is, “Oh, that means you have to ditch your iPhone, move out of London or Edmonton and live in a shack in the Rocky Mountains and grow organic carrots.”
That is one form of slowing down, but it’s not the only one because I think of slow as being a state of mind.
It’s how you use time. It’s how you move through an environment that might be very busy and noisy, full of distractions and stimulations.
But if you’re able to negotiate that without getting swept up in it, then I think a city can be a pretty wonderful place to live slow.
Is fast always bad?
I’m not anti-fast. Slow is about doing things at the right speed, which means understanding there are times to be fast. There are times to slow it down and there are times to do nothing at all, to be completely still.
Talk about the cult of busyness.
Busy has become a badge of honour. It has become an end in itself, really.
You meet someone in the street, whether it’s in London or in Edmonton, and you say, “How are you doing?” and they say, “Busy.”
If someone isn’t busy, they feel like they’re failing somehow or getting left behind or missing out.
You feel ashamed, guilty, like a loser because the taboo against slowness is so deep in our culture.
But living slow doesn’t sound exciting.
People often say slow means couch potato, falling behind or being boring when it’s none of those things.
I think a fast-forward life is a whole lot more boring than a slow one.
When every moment of the day is a race against the clock, you’re just skimming the surface of your life.
When you start to slow down, start to connect, start to think deeply, start to enjoy and immerse yourself in the moment, I think that’s when the fireworks happen.
What about boredom setting in?
Boredom has become the great cardinal sin of the early 21st century, especially for parents and children.
If you think of families throughout all human history, when a child came to a parent and said, ‘I’m bored,’ that was the child’s problem. Your mom or your dad would say, ‘Go outside, find someone to play with, use your imagination.’
Now (in today’s world) it’s the parent’s fault.
Suddenly, the parent thinks, ‘I’m failing. Where’s the iPad? Maybe we need another extracurricular activity.’
If you back off and let children be bored, boredom can be a springboard to all kinds of discovery.
What discussions need to start happening around bringing a slow culture into the workplace?
If you’re being asked to dig yourself out of an economic hole, the solution is work better and smarter, not to work longer and harder.
You need to talk about (fewer) working hours and (switching off ) technology.
The other thing is actually slowing down in the workplace and building in a slow moment: I’m going to go away and eat my sandwich in the canteen or I’m going to go for a walk with a colleague or do a bit of yoga, something that changes gears.