All my life I have been a hare: rushing from one activity to another, my mind on the task ahead before I finished the one I was engaged in. Only after my relapse and enforced rest in the hospital did I morph into a tortoise. At the time, I thought this was a temporary transformation, while I worked on recovery. But it soon became apparent that life in the slow lane was my future, and despite my initial chafing, I soon realised what a blessing it was.
And it seems that I am not the only one who can see the advantage of taking things slowly. There is an entire movement devoted to it! Carl Honore describes it this way:
“It is a cultural revolution against the notion that faster is always better. The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail‘s pace. It’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed. Savoring the hours and minutes rather than just counting them. Doing everything as well as possible, instead of as fast as possible. It’s about quality over quantity in everything from work to food to parenting.” — Honoré.[3]
Let’s unpack this a little.
Doing everything at the right speed
For me, doing everything at the right speed generally means quite slowly. After years of juggling and multi-tasking, I have come to love this. Even the most mundane of tasks, such as washing dishes or chopping vegetables, becomes a joy and not a chore. When you focus on what you are doing, it is an opportunity for mindfulness.
Bringing our full attention to a task enables us to rest in the activity. I know that seems a contradiction, but it’s true. Being fully absorbed is very tranquil. All the silly thoughts and worries that usually compete for our attention like manic toddlers in a ball pit are replaced with calm, unhurried contemplation. Perhaps we think of the meal we are in the midst of preparing, the texture and colour of the ingredient or perhaps we even feel gratitude for nature’s abundance and our access to it. Such musings improve our mood while getting what is needed done.
Savouring the hours and minutes
While we rush from one thing to another, time always feels like the enemy: breathing down our necks and urging us to race until our lungs burst. It is a brutal slave master, who can never be satisfied.
When we slow down; however, time does too. It seems to unfold to permit us to truly savour our activity, no matter now prosaic. When I am doing art or piano practice, time is no longer relevant, only the page, only the notes. When we bring this practice to our friendships, it allows us to listen with a depth we have not imagined possible and for our friends to feel truly heard.
Quality over quantity
It should come as no surprise that attentive work results in better work. If we can discipline ourselves to slow down and work with care, we are almost guaranteed that what we produce will be pleasing to us. This is not to say that we will always be perfect, but allowing ourselves time means that we can adjust for mistakes and avoid them.
Take driving for example. If we are rushing along, perhaps even speeding, we will be unable to brake or swerve safely if some misfortune befalls the person ahead of us. Or we may miss our turn and be forced to make a long, circuitous detour to get back on track. Or we may simply be raising our blood pressure to dangerous levels in our obsession with reaching our goal in record time.
As with driving, so with life. If I am making a meal, I can continually make micro adjustments to flavourings as I go, ensuring the final result is just how I want it. We can focus on quality when we give ourselves time to do so. The slow movement began with a protest against a fast food chain. I don’t think I need to write further on the difference in quality of fast food versus a home-cooked meal.
For a fuller discussion of The Slow Movement, I encourage you to watch the TED talk below:
Getting things done
This is all very well, you may argue, but I have got a lot to do! No doubt, but the strangest thing of all is that I found I am able to do more not less now that I live more slowly. Whilst at the beginning, I was being driven crazy by my less than cooperative body, now I find the restraints it puts on me quite positive. Rushing and multi-tasking are no longer options, but that doesn’t mean I do nothing at all. If anything, my life is fuller than before and infinitely richer.
How?
And here’s the secret. With MS, we are urged to think in terms of time not task to avoid over-exertion and paying with hours of fatigue. It took me a long while to get my head around this and I still forget sometimes and pay the consequences with dizziness, nausea and hours lying on the sofa. But this idea of allocating a specific amount of time to an activity is immensely helpful.
Many of know the time and motion quote by Parkinson that says, ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’. Though he was concerned with bureaucracies, we are all aware of how often this holds true in the workplace and even the home.
If we allocate a small and reasonable amount of time to do something, more often than not, we complete it. This may be because we are not trying to do anything else (multi-tasking) or because we are more focused and productive.
And if a task requires more time than we can manage in one session, we simply have to break it up into its component parts. As Henry Ford said:
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
Henry Ford
Building a car is a daunting prospect, but by allocating small tasks to a large number of workers, he was able to produce a car in as little as 93 minutes!
I would not suggest that you make your life a production line, but by breaking up tasks, it is quite amazing what you can do with no ill-effects to your health. It has also given me hope for the future. It is likely that my stamina will decrease as my disease progresses, but this way of living makes that far less of a scary prospect. I shall simply have to divide and sub-divide tasks into their manageable portions and not give them up altogether.
Slow is not being lazy or doing nothing. It is simply changing priorities. As Guttorm Floistad points out, it is reminding ourselves of what is essential and in doing so, improving our own and others’ lives.
“The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.”
Professor Guttorm Fløistad
The ancients had it right. Slow and steady really does win the race, as Aesop suggested in his fable. Winning is not just reaching the finishing line either; it is making the journey an enjoyable and fulfilling one where we appreciate the landscape and the people we meet along the way.
