Praising slowness - Carl Honore

What I'd like to start off with is an observation, which is that if I've learned anything over the last year, it's that the supreme irony of publishing a book about slowness is that you have to go around promoting it really fast. I seem to spend most of my time these days, you know, zipping from city to city, studio to studio, interview to interview, serving up the book in really tiny bite-sized chunks because everyone these days wants to know how to slow down. But they want to know how to slow down really quickly.

So I did a spot on CNN the other day where I actually spent more time in makeup than I did talking on air. I think that that's not really surprising though, is it? Because that's kind of the world that we live in now—a world stuck in fast-forward, a world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster. With cramming more and more into less and less time, every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock. To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, which is in my bio there, I'll just toss it out again: these days, even instant gratification takes too long.

And if you think about how we try to make things better, what do we do? Well, we speed them up. Don't we? So you know, we used to dial, and now we speed dial. We used to read, now we speed read. We used to walk, now we speed walk. And of course, we used to date, and now we speed date. And even things that are by their very nature slow, we try and speed them up too.

I was in New York recently, and I walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new course—a new evening course—and it was for, you guessed it, speed yoga. So this is the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to, you know, salute the sun but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it. These are sort of the extreme examples, and they're amusing and good to laugh at. But there's a very serious point.

I think that in the headlong dash of daily life, we often lose sight of the damage that this Roadrunner form of living does to us. We're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives—on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships, the environment, and our community. Sometimes, it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them? That we're living the fast life instead of the good life.

I think for many people that wake-up call takes the form of an illness, you know, a burnout. Or eventually, the body says, "I can't take it anymore" and throws in the towel. Or maybe a relationship goes up in smoke because we don't have the time, the patience, or the tranquility to be with the other person, to listen to them. My wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son. I found that at the end of the day, I would go into his room and I just couldn't slow down. You know, I’d be speed reading The Cat in the Hat. I’d be, you know, I’d be skipping lines here, paragraphs there—sometimes a whole page.

Of course, my little boy knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. What should have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of the day when a dad sits down to read to his son became instead this kind of gladiatorial battle of wills—a clash between his speed and my speed, and his slowness. This went on for some time until I caught myself scanning a newspaper article with time-saving tips for fast people, and one of them made reference to a series of books called The One-Minute Bedtime Story.

I can by now saying those words, but my first reaction at the time was very different. My first reflex was to say, "Hallelujah! Yeah, what a great idea! This is exactly what I'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more." But thankfully, a light bulb went on over my head, and my next reaction was very different. I took a step back and I thought, "Whoa, has it really come to this? Am I really in such a hurry that I'm prepared to fob off my son with a sound bite at the end of the day?" I put away the newspaper, and I was getting on a plane. I sat there, and I did something I hadn't done for a long time, which was I did nothing. I just thought.

I thought long and hard, and by the time I got off that plane, I decided I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to investigate this whole Roadrunner culture and what it was doing to me and to everyone else. I had two questions in my head. The first was: How did we get so fast? And the second is: Is it possible or even desirable to slow down?

Now, if you think about how our world got so accelerated, the usual suspects rear their heads. You think of, you know, urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, technology. But I think if you cut those forces, you get to what might be the deeper driver—the nub of the question—which is how we think about time itself. In other cultures, time is cyclical—it's seen as moving in great, unhurried circles. It's always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is linear. It's a finite resource; it's always draining away. You either use it or lose it—time is money, as Benjamin Franklin said.

I think what that does to us psychologically is it creates an equation: time is scarce. So what do we do? Well, we speed up, don't we? We try and do more and more with less and less time. We turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line—a finish line, incidentally, that we never reach, but a finish line nonetheless. I guess that the question is: Is it possible to break free from that mindset?

Thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I discovered when I began looking around is that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better and that busier is best. Right across the world, people are doing the unthinkable—they're slowing down and finding that although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down, you're roadkill, the opposite turns out to be true. By slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better: they eat better, they make love better, they exercise better, they work better, they live better.

In this kind of cauldron of moments and places and acts of deceleration lie what a lot of people now refer to as the International Slow Movement. Now, if you'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy, I'll just give you a very quick overview of what's going on inside the slow movement. If you think of food, many of you will have heard of the Slow Food Movement, which started in Italy but has spread across the world and now has a hundred thousand members in 50 countries. It's driven by a very simple and sensible message, which is that we get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook, and consume it at a reasonable pace.

I think also the explosion of the organic farming movement and the renaissance of farmers' markets is another illustration of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating, cooking, and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable. They want to get back to slower rhythms. Out of the Slow Food Movement has grown something called the Slow Cities Movement, which started in Italy but has spread right across Europe and beyond. In these towns, people begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another.

They might curb traffic or put in a park bench or some green space. In some ways, these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts because I think when a slow city becomes officially a slow city, it's kind of like a philosophical declaration. It's saying to the rest of the world and to the people in that town that we believe that in the 21st century, slowness has a role to play.

In medicine, I think a lot of people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine. Millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine, which tend to tap into sort of slower, gentler, more holistic forms of healing. Now, obviously, the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies, and I personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever, you know, gain mainstream approval. But other treatments such as acupuncture and massage, and even just relaxation, clearly have some kind of benefit. Blue-chip medical colleges everywhere are starting to study these things to find out how they work and what we might learn from them.

Sex—there's an awful lot of fast sex around, isn’t there? I was coming to Ottawa (no pun intended), and I was making my way, let’s say, slowly to Oxford. I went through a newsagent and I saw a magazine—a men's magazine—and it said on the front, "How to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds." So, you know, even sex is on a stopwatch these days. Now, I like a quickie as much as the next person, but I think that there’s an awful lot to be gained from slow sex—from slowing down in the bedroom. You know, you tap into those deeper sorts of psychological, emotional, spiritual currents, and you get a better orgasm with buildup. You do get more bang for your buck, let’s say.

I mean, the Pointer Sisters said it most eloquently, didn’t they, when they sang the praises of a lover with a slow hand. Now, we all laughed at Sting a few years ago when he went tantric, but you fast-forward a few years, and now you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops or maybe just on their own, in their own bedrooms, finding ways to put on the brakes and have better sex. And of course, in Italy—where Italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure—they've launched an official Slow Sex Movement.

In the workplace, right across much of the world, I mean, North America being a notable exception, working hours have been coming down, and Europe is an example of that. People are finding that their quality of life improves as they're working less; also that their hourly productivity goes up. Now, clearly, there are problems with the 35-hour work week in France—too much, too soon, too rigid. But other countries in Europe, notably the Nordic countries, are showing that it's possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on earth, and they work the kind of hours that would make the average American weep with envy.

If you go beyond sort of country level down to the micro company level, more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug—to take a lunch break or to go sit in a quiet room—to switch off their BlackBerrys and laptops, you know, at the back, mobile phones during the workday or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mode of thought.

It's not just, though, these days adults who are overworked, is it? As children—I'm 37, and my childhood ended in the mid-80s. I look at kids now, and I'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework, more tutoring, and more extracurriculars than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago. Some of the most heart-rending emails that I get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write to their parents to help them slow down—to help them get off this full-throttle treadmill.

But thankfully, there is a backlash there in parenting as well, and you're finding that towns in the United States are now banding together and banning extracurriculars on a particular day of the month so that people can decompress and have some family time and slow down. Homework is another thing; there are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools that had been piling on the homework for years, and now they're discovering that less can be more.

So there was a case up in Scotland recently where a fee-paying, high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13. The high-achieving parents freaked out and said, "What do you mean? Our kids, our fault!" The headmaster said, "No, no, your children need to slow down at the end of the day." Just this last month, the exam results came in, and in math and science, marks went up 20% on average last year.

What's very revealing is that the elite universities, which are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and hothouse them so much, are starting to notice the caliber of students coming to them is falling. These kids have wonderful marks; they have CVs jammed with extracurriculars to the point that would make your eyes water, but they lack spark. They lack the ability to think creatively and outside the box; they don't know how to dream.

What these Ivy League schools and Oxford and Cambridge and so on are starting to send a message to parents and students is that they need to put on the brakes a little bit. In Harvard, for instance, they send out a letter to undergraduates, to freshmen, telling them that they'll get more out of life and more out of Harvard if they put on the brakes. If they do less but give time to things—the time that things need to enjoy them, to savor them—and even if they sometimes do nothing at all. That letter is called "Slow Down!" with an exclamation mark on the end.

So wherever you look, the message it seems to me is the same: that less is very often more—that slower is very often better. But that said, of course, it's not that easy to slow down, is it? I mean, you heard that I got a speeding ticket while I was researching my book on the benefits of slowness, and that's true. But that's not all of it. I was actually en route to a dinner held by Slow Food at the time, and if that's not shaming enough, I got that ticket in Italy. If any of you have ever driven on an Italian highway, you have a pretty good idea of how fast I was going.

But why is it so hard to slow down? I think there are various reasons. One is that speed is fun, you know? Speed is sexy—all that adrenaline rush; it's hard to give it up. I think there's a kind of metaphysical dimension that speed becomes a way of rolling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions. We fill our heads with distraction and busyness so that we don't have to ask, "Am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf?"

Another reason I think—perhaps even the most powerful reason why we find it hard to slow down—is the cultural taboo that we've erected against slowing down. Slow is a dirty word in our culture; it's a byword for lazy slacker, for being somebody who gives up. You know, he's a bit slow. It's actually synonymous with being stupid. I guess what the purpose of the Slow Movement—or where its main goal really is—to tackle that taboo and to say that, yes, sometimes slow is not the answer.

There is such a thing as bad slow. You know that. I mean, I got stuck on the M25, which is the ring road around London recently, and spent three and a half hours there. I can tell you that's really bad slow. But the new idea—the sort of revolutionary idea of the Slow Movement—is that there is such a thing as good slow too. Good slow is, you know, taking the time to eat a meal with your family with the TV switched off or taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best decision at work. Or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor your life.

One of the things that I found most uplifting about all of this stuff that's happened around the book since it came out is the reaction to it. I knew that when my book on slowness came out, it would be welcomed by the New Age brigade. But it's also been taken up with great gusto by the corporate world, in the sort of business press, but also, you know, big companies and leadership organizations. Because people at the top of the chain—people like you—I think are starting to realize that there's too much speed in the system. There's too much busyness, and it's time to find or get back to that lost part of shifting gears.

Another encouraging sign, I think, is that it’s not just in the developed world that this idea is being taken up. In the developing world, in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first-world status—like China, Brazil, Thailand, Poland, and so on—these countries have embraced the idea of the slow movement. Many, many people in them, and there’s a debate going on in their media, on the streets, because I think they’re looking at the West and saying, “Well, we like that aspect of what you’ve got, but we’re not so sure about that.”

So all of that said— is it, I guess, is it possible? That’s really the main question before us today. Is it possible to slow down? And I’m happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes. And I present myself as an exhibit A—a kind of reformed and rehabilitated speedaholic. I still love speed, you know? I live in London, and I work as a journalist, and I enjoy the buzz and the busyness and the adrenaline rush that comes from both of those things. I play squash and ice hockey—very fast sports—and I wouldn’t give them up for the world.

But I’ve also, over the last year or so, got in touch with my inner tortoise. What that means is that I no longer overload myself gratuitously. My default mode is no longer to be a rushaholic. I no longer hear time’s winged chariot drawing near—or at least not as much as I did before. I can actually hear it now because I see my time is ticking off, and the upshot of all of that is that I actually feel a lot happier, healthier, and more productive than I ever have. I feel like I’m living my life rather than actually just racing through it.

The most important measure of the success of this, I feel, is that I think my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, and stronger. For me, I guess the litmus test for whether this would work and what it would mean was always going to be bedtime stories because that's sort of where the journey began. And there too the news is rosy. I, you know, at the end of the day, I go into my son’s room. I don’t wear a watch. I switch off my computer so I can’t hear the email pinging into the basket, and I just slow down to his pace.

We read, and because children have their own tempo and internal clock, they don’t do quality time—you can’t schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you. They need you to move at their rhythm. I find that 10 minutes into a story, you know, my son will suddenly say, “You know, something happened in the playground today that really bothered me,” and we’ll go off and have a conversation on that. I now find that bedtime stories used to be kind of a box, unlike a to-do list—something that I’d read because it was so slow, and I had to get through it quickly. It’s become my reward at the end of the day—something I really cherish.

And I have a kind of Hollywood ending to my talk this afternoon, which goes a little bit like this: A few months ago, I was getting ready to go on another book tour, and I had my bags packed. I was downstairs by the front door, and I was waiting for a taxi. My son came down the stairs, and he made a card for me. He was carrying it; he’d gone and stapled two cards very much like these together and put a sticker of his favorite character, Tintin, on the front. He handed it to me, and when I read it, it said, “To Daddy, love Benjamin.” I thought, “Oh, that’s really sweet. You know, is that a good luck on the book tour card?”

He said, “No, no, no, Daddy! This is a card for being the best story reader in the world.” I thought, “Yeah, you know, this slowing down thing really does work.” Thank you very much.