Take the Slow Road to Happiness

Written By Jason Shields

What I'd like to start this article off with is an observation. If I've learned anything over the last year, it's that the supreme irony of publishing a book on Taoism “I Know I am Now” which is about slowing down in life and being in the Now is that I have to go around promoting it really fast. I seem to spend most of my time these days, zipping from city to city, studio to studio, interview to interview, serving up the book in really tiny bite-size chunks. Everyone these days wants to know how to slow down, but they want to know how to slow down really quickly. We live in 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 is the current theme. Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock. To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, "These days even instant gratification takes too long." And if you really think about how we try to make things better, what do we do? We speed things up. We used to dial; 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 Chicago recently, and I walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for 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 “salute the sun,” but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it. These are the extreme examples we find in our society now, and they're amusing and good to laugh at.

But there's a very serious point, and 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 are so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it is taking on every aspect of our lives: on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships, the environment and our community. And sometimes it takes a wake-up call to alert us to the fact that we are hurrying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we are living the fast life, instead of the good life. And I think for many people, the wake-up call takes the form of an illness, a burn-out, and eventually the body says, "I can't take it anymore," and throw in the towel. Or maybe your relationship goes up in smoke because you haven't had the time, or the patience, or the tranquility, to be with the other person, to actually listen to them.

And my wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my goddaughter, who routinely stays with us, and I found that at the end of day, I would go into her room and I just couldn't slow down! I would speed read "The Cat in The Hat." I would be skipping lines here, paragraphs there, sometimes a whole page and of course, my little goddaughter knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. And what should have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of the day, when you sit down to read to a child, it became a clash of the titans between my speed and her slowness. This continued on for some time until I caught myself scanning a newspaper article with time-saving tips for fast, busy people. And one of them made reference to a series of books called "The One-Minute Bedtime Story." And I, I wince saying those words now, but my first reaction at the time was very different. My first reflex was to say, "Hallelujah, what a fantastic idea!” This is exactly what I'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more." But thankfully, a light bulb clicked on over my head, and my next reaction was quite different. I took a step back, thought, "Whoa! Jason, has it really come to this? Am I really in such a hurry that I'm prepared to fob off my goddaughter with a sound byte at the end of the day?" I put away the newspaper, and as I was getting on a plane, I just sat there and I did something I had not done for a long time, nothing. I did nothing. I just thought, and I pondered long and hard. And by the time I got off that plane, I had 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 became so accelerated, the usual suspects rear their ugly heads. You think of urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, technology. But if you were to cut through those forces you get to what might be the deepest primary driver, the purpose 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; always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is a one-way linear street. It is a finite resource, it is always draining away. You either use it, or lose it. As Benjamin Franklin said “Time is money.”  What is this doing to us psychologically? It creates an equation. Time is perceived as a scarcity, so what do we do? We speed up! 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 the ultimate question should be “Is it possible to break free from this mindset?” Thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I have discovered, when I began looking around, 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 will end up being 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, and they live better. These types of slow moments, places and periods of deceleration are what some people in various parts of the world 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 is going on inside the Slow Movement. If you think of food, many of you will have heard of the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy, and has spread across the world, and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries. And it is driven by a very simple and sensible message, “We get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook and consume it at a reasonable pace.”  I think that the explosion of the organic farming movement, and the renaissance farmers' markets, are other illustrations of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and 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 has started in Italy, but has spread right across Europe and beyond. In this movement, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape, so that people are encouraged to literally slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another. So 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 is kind of like a philosophical declaration. It is saying to the rest of 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 believe many people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine. And millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine, which tend to tap into sort of slower, gentler, and 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 gain mainstream approval. But other treatments such as acupuncture and massage, and even just relaxation and meditation, clearly have some kind of benefit. Even “blue-chip” medical colleges everywhere are beginning to study these things to find out how they work, and what we might learn from them.

Sex. There is an awful lot of fast sex around, isn't there? I was coming to -- well -- no pun intended there. I was making my way, let's say, slowly to my next workshop in New York, and I went through a news stand 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." Even sex is on a stopwatch these days. Now, you know, I like quickies just as much as the next person, but I think that there is an awful lot to be gained from slow sex, from slowing down with your partner in the bedroom. You tap into a deep seated power where you discover the deeper psychological, emotional, spiritual currents, and you achieve a better orgasm with this slow buildup. Society all laughed at Sting a few years ago when he went Tantric, but 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 the brakes on and have better sex. And of course, in Italy where -- I mean, Italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure -- they've launched an official Slow Sex movement.

Let us turn to the workplace, right across much of the world, North America being a notable exception; working hours have been coming down. Europe is an example of this, and people are finding that their quality of life improves as they work less, and 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 is possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. As a result, 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. Further, if you go beyond the country level and down at the micro-company level, more and more companies are finally realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or simply take time to unplug: take a lunch break, or to go sit in a quiet room and switch off their Blackberrys and mobile devices, during the work day or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and allow the brain to slide into a kind of creative mode of thought.

It is not just adults these days who overwork themselves. It is children, too. My childhood ended in the mid-'90s, and I look at children now and I'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework, more tutoring, more extracurricular activities, than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago. And some of the most heart wrenching emails that I get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write or talk to their parents, to help them slow down, to help them get off this fast moving treadmill. Thankfully, there is a backlash there in parenting as well, and we are discovering that many towns in the United States are now coming together extracurricular activities on a particular day of the month, so that people can decompress, slow down and have some quality family time.

Homework is another story. There are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools which have been piling on the homework for years, and now researchers are discovering that less can be more. There was a case up in Scotland where a fee-paying, high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13, and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said, "What are you doing? Our students will fail". The headmaster said, "No, your children need to slow down at the end of the day." And just this last month, the exam results came in, and in math and science, marks went up 20 percent on average last year. What is very revealing in this study is that the elite universities, who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and push them so much, they are beginning to notice the quality of the students coming to them is falling. These children have wonderful grades and they have their social lives jammed with extracurricular activities, to the point that would make your eyes water. However, they lack spark, they lack the ability to think creatively and think outside the box, they don't know how to dream.

These Ivy League schools, such as Oxford and Cambridge and so on, are beginning to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit. In Harvard, for example, they send out a letter to undergraduates, mainly the freshmen, telling them that they will get more out of life, and more out of Harvard, if they put on the brakes: do less, but give time to things, the time that things need, to enjoy them, to savor them, even if it means sometimes do nothing at all. And 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: less is very often more and slower is very often better. With all of this said, of course, it is not easy to slow down, is it? I mean, I received a speeding ticket on my way to a lecture on “I Know I am Now” which has the main message of slowing down, and heralds the benefits of slowness. I was actually en route to a dinner held by Slow Food at the time. And if that's not shameful enough, I got that ticket in Ohio. And if any of you have ever driven on an Ohio highway, you'll 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, it is “sexy”.  It is all that adrenaline rushing through your body. It's hard to give it up. I also think there is a kind of metaphysical dimension to speed. Speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions that truly challenge us and make us think deeply about where we are in life. We fill our head with distractions, with busy-ness, 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, 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 is synonymous with lazy, slackers, for being somebody who gives up. You have heard at one time or another, "he's a bit slow." It's actually synonymous with being stupid.

The main purpose of the Slow Movement is to tackle that taboo, and to say that, yes, sometimes slow is not the answer, that there is such a thing as "bad slow." On our way home from Chicago recently, we got stuck on the Interstate due to a traffic accident and spent three and a half hours there just idling and creeping along. And 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," also. Good slow is taking the time to eat a meal with your family, with the TV turned off; 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 the simple joys of your life.

Now, 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. And I knew that when my book on Tantra and Taoism 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, big companies and leadership organizations. People at the top of the chain are beginning to realize that there is too much speed in the system, there is too much busy-ness, and it is time to find, or get back to, that lost art of shifting into lower gears. Another encouraging sign is that it is not just in the developed world that this idea is taking root. In the developing world, in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status, such as China, Brazil, Thailand, Poland, and so on, these countries have embraced the idea of the Slow Movement. There are many people in them, and there is a debate going on in their media and on the streets. I believe they are looking at the West, and they are saying, "Well, we like that aspect of what you've got, but we're not so sure about that."

Is it possible? That's really the main question before us today. Is it possible to slow down? And I am happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes. And I present myself as Exhibit A, a kind of reformed-and-rehabilitated speed-aholic. Don’t get me wrong; i still love speed. You know, I travel to and fro, I work as an author with deadlines and I see a multitude of clients daily and I enjoy the buzz and the busy-ness, and the adrenaline rush that comes from all of those things. I workout daily and I love aerobic activity, 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.

And what that means is that I no longer overload myself gratuitously. My default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic. I no longer hear ticking of the clock with time's winged chariot drawing near, or at least not as much as I did before. The beauty of all of this is that I actually feel a lot happier, healthier, more productive, than I ever have. I feel like I'm my life rather than actually just racing through it. And perhaps, the most important measure of the success of this is that I feel that my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, and stronger.

For me, the litmus test for whether this would work, and what it would mean, was always going to be bedtime stories, because that's kind of where the journey began. At the end of the day, when my goddaughter is staying with us, I go into her room. I don't wear a watch. I switch off my computer, so I can't hear the email pinging into the inbox, and I just slow down to her pace and we read. Children have their own tempo and internal clock, they don't do quality time, where you 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 with Samantha, she  will suddenly say, "You know, something happened at school today that really bothered me." And we'll go off and have a conversation on that. And I now find that bedtime stories used to be a kind of -- a box on my to-do list, something that I dreaded, because it was so slow and I had to get through it quickly. I had other work to do. It has become my reward at the end of the day, something I really, really cherish. And I have a kind of Hollywood ending to my article here 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, and my Samantha came down the stairs and she'd made a card for me. She handed it to me with a bright big smile and I read it, and it said, "To Jason, love Samantha." And I thought, "Aah, that's really sweet, you know, is this a good luck on the book tour card?" And she said, "No, no, no, Jason, this is a card for being the best story reader in the world." And I thought, "Yeah, you know, this slowing down thing ... " It works.