Slow, Slow, Slow Down!

Message of the ‘International Day of Slowness’.

By Joe Eruppakkatt (Originally published in The Teenager Youth Magazine

“Two of the most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
-- Leo Tolstoy

‘World day of Peace’, ‘World Day of the Sick’, ‘World day of Environment, ‘World Day of Rice’... the list of such World Days is endless and sometimes fascinating. However, have you heard of something called the ‘International Day of Slowness’?

Yes, here is another date to circle your calendar. A Milan-based group called L’Arte Del Vivere Con Lentezza’ (The Art of Living Slow) has assigned February 19 as the ‘International Day of Slowness’. It was observed for the first time in 2007. The group hopes that it would be a day of enjoyment, reflection, and pro-slow events, helping people everywhere to find ways to put on the brakes at work, at home, or wherever.

However, there already existed an ‘International Day of Slowness’, known as ‘Journee de la Lenteur’ declared by a group in Montreal, Canada and later taken up in other countries. This group had assigned June 21, the longest day of the year, as the International Day of Slowness.

We live in an age of fast foods, fast prayer, fast tracks, fast walking, fast growth, fast what not! We work fast, we eat fast and we pray fast. Recently I heard of a technique called fast reading. We read without going through each word and line, but read only in so far as you understand the meaning of the text as a whole. This is symbolic of the life we live in this post-modern time. We overlook many words and lines; many sounds and signs; many faces and expressions; many needs and cries in our rat race for success, achievement and result.

Hence, the movement towards slowing down the pace of life. The philosophy behind this movement intents to promote slow breathing, slow dance, slow music, slow eating, slow walking, slow praying, slow reading, slow thinking, slow singing and slow everything. The proverb ‘if you chew slowly, you can eat even a palm tree” is based on this philosophy.

According to this movement, a fast-paced life leaves no room for entertainment, relaxation, reflection, meaningful relationship and above all time for and with the creator God. Time saved through such accelerated life is often time wasted. Says William Rogers: “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” Long ago I had heard a wise man, Fr Thomas Cheruvil, the former Editor of The Teenager, cautioning youngsters: “Hurry leads to worry”. How true his advice is, if only we analyze many of our own speedy races and the troubles they land us in!

Slowness is not to be confused with laziness. It does not mean a compulsive procrastination of things needed to be done. It is not opposed to fast economic, educational and social development of a society or a country. It does not justify the indifference and apathy of officials to clear the files and help execute projects and clear citizen’s concerns. Nor does slowness justify backlog in disposing justice to the common man.

Positive slowness is productive and active and growth-oriented. It is a time to reconnect with our ‘inner tortoise’ in this stressful world. A recent report in the New York Times said that Pricewater Coopers, a well known accounting firm, has decided to close down its entire US operations twice a year to ensure that its employees slow down. Everything stops for 10 days over Christmas and five days around the 4th of July. During the year the company also sends electronic reminders to the staff who fail to take enough vacation time. Says one high ranking member of the firm: “We wanted to create an environment where people could walk away and not worry about missing a meeting, a conference call or 300 E-mails”. Not surprisingly, the company’s productivity is much higher since the innovative idea began to be put into practice.

A new quarterly magazine has been launched in the Netherlands called ‘Slow Management’. As the title suggests, it is all about applying the ‘Slow philosophy’ to the world of management: freeing companies and staff from the destructive obsession with speed, targets and short-term profits. The aim is to show why managers should manage with a light touch. It also gives lots of real-life examples of how to do so.

Slowness can be irritating for some. They always like to be one yard ahead of others in everything. They complain that their colleague or partner is too slow to the point of frustration. In our ‘speedaholic’ culture, we often hear the expressions, ‘there is no time’ and ‘how I wish the day had more than 24 hours’.

Nature has its on slow and steady pace. Nothing can force or induce nature to speed up the natural process of birth, growth and death. A seed sown in the field takes its time to sprout, produce its first leaf, grow and become a plant and produce flower and then fruit. The farmer waits day and night for its growth until he can harvest the fruit. A good lesson on how to ‘slow down’!

Slowing down can leave us enough time to connect with God, the source of all power and giver of all gifts. God is known, experienced, loved, and prayed to in stillness, gentleness and leisureliness. In our busy life it is possible that we forget God and his gifts. However, God patiently waits morning after morning, evening after evening, day after day for a moment of quiet and personal conversation with us. Experiencing the living God daily for a few moments can brighten up and energize our dull and sometimes chaotic lives. And God’s gentle touch and merciful love can be experienced only in stillness.

A business executive from Austria tells the story of how he found that prayer is the ultimate form of slowness: One day he arrived in Vatican to finalize a big business deal. He arrived from Vienna with a full day’s schedule of meetings, but instead of hurrying to the first of them, a priest escorted him to a chapel to pray for 45 minutes! And they stopped for further prayers after every meeting throughout the busy day. At first he was anxious and restless, but eventually he surrendered to the ritual and actually found the breaks quite soothing. He also found that the meetings were more relaxed and more efficient because he had time to reflect, recharge and even plan better.

The following excerpt from a poem, written by a terminally ill young girl who had just six months to live explains why we should slow down:

“You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast, time is short.
The music won’t last.
When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift thrown away.
Life is not a race, do take it slower
Hear the music before the song is over.

Carl Honore wrote the best-selling book, In Praise of Slow. He says: “Speed has helped us to remake our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating. But our obsession with speed has turned into an addiction….When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay”.

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