The Beauty of Slowing Down

Carl Honore

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062123602
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This selection from award-winning journalist Carl Honore's In Praise of Slowness introduces us to people all over the world who are reclaiming their time and slowing down the pace—and living happier, more productive, and healthier lives as a result.

A slow revolution is taking place. This is a modern revolution, championed by cell-phone using, emailing lovers of sanity. The slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. People are discovering energy and efficiency where you may have least expected—in slowing down. In The Beauty of Slowing Down rehabilitated speedaholic Carl Honore presents an engaging and entertaining exploration of a movement whose moment has finally come.

The Beauty of Slowing Down

For fast-acting relief from stress, try slowing down.

—Lily Tomlin, American actress and comedienne

Wagrain, a resort town nestled deep in the Austrian Alps, moves at a slow pace. People come here to escape the hurly-burly of Salzburg and Vienna. In the summer, they hike the wooded trails and picnic beside mountain streams. When the snow falls, they ski through the forests, or down the steep, powdery slopes. Whatever the season, the Alpine air fills the lungs with the promise of a good night’s sleep back in the chalet.

Once a year, though, this small town does more than just live at a slow pace. It becomes a launch pad for the Slow philosophy. Every October, Wagrain hosts the annual conference of the Society for the Deceleration of Time.

Based in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt, and boasting a membership that stretches across central Europe, the Society is a leader in the Slow movement. Its more than one thousand members are foot soldiers in the war against the cult of doing everything faster. In daily life, that means slowing down when it makes sense to do so. If a Society member is a doctor, he might insist on taking more time to chat to his patients. A management consultant could refuse to answer work calls on the weekend. A designer might cycle to meetings instead of driving. The Decelerators use a German word—eigenzeit—to sum up their creed. Eigen means “own” and zeit means “time.” In other words, every living being, event, process or object has its own inherent time or pace, its own tempo giusto.

As well as publishing earnest papers on man’s relationship with time, the Society stirs up debate with tongue-in-cheek publicity stunts. Members patrol city centres wearing sandwich boards emblazoned with the slogan “Please hurry up!” Not long ago, the Society called on the International Olympic Committee to award gold medals to the athletes with the slowest times.

“Belonging to the Slow movement does not mean that you must always be slow—we take planes, too!—or that you must always be very serious and very philosophical, or that you want to spoil everybody else’s fun,” says Michaela Schmoczer, the Society’s very efficient secretary. “Seriousness is okay, but you don’t need to lose the humour.”

With that in mind, the Decelerators regularly run “speed traps” in town centres. Using a stopwatch, they time pedestrians going about their daily business. People caught covering 50 metres in less than thirty-seven seconds are pulled over and asked to explain their haste. Their punishment is to walk the same 50 metres while steering a complicated turtle marionette along the pavement. “It is always a huge success,” says Jurgen Adam, a schoolteacher who ran a...