Good Intentions
London skyline
My Life is paved with good intentions that I never quite get round to doing, one of those being sampling the delights of all that is on offer in London. You know how it is, you read about a talk, a film, a gig in the paper and make plans to go, but it gets to 6pm, you’ve had a shitty day at work and all you can think about is going home.
But last Monday I stuck to my guns, mainly because the speaker in question is brilliant and it was the first public outing for Slow Down London. In the rain and cold on the most miserable day of the year, I wearily made my way to the Alternatives talk to hear Carl Honoré talking about why we need to celebrate slow.
Carl was, as ever entertaining (have you heard the one about dining al desko?), a font of knowledge and wisdom (did you know that staring at the screen for hours on end has the impact of bringing down your IQ by 10 points?) and inspiring on this subject of slow down and a good reminder of why we are doing this festival.
A week on, the things that are still resonating for me are connected with
how pervasive this cult of speed really is, or maybe how we see it as being normal. Whether its sex or telling stories to our children, we are all trying to do it faster – ironically so that we can find time to relax.
Yet the joy of doing only one thing at a time or giving more time to do any activity actually seems to bring us what we really desire! I have found myself taking time to stop for lunch, but more importantly I have a decided to listen instead of speak and found myself feeling calmer and have had better results in meetings.
This stuff is not rocket science but it seems to me that we need constant reminders about what we can do and why we should do it. We would love to hear some of the things that you might be doing to create a new culture of living life in real time.
Deepa Patel – Director, Slow Down London
