Slow Story Text

I'm thinking that instead of writing a fictional story for this half of the book I want to include facts about the pace of modern life and the benefits of living life at a slower pace. I found an article that pretty much covers everything:

The Slow Life

Do you have the feeling that life is getting away from you, that there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done? Don’t worry, it’s not just you, the pace of city life really is speeding up.

A recent survey by the University of Hertfordshire and British Council found that city dwellers are walking 10 percent faster than in 1994. Singapore topped the list with locals rushing around 30 percent faster than they were in the early 1990’s.

Deliberately slowing your walking pace in the city against this rising tide of rushaholics could see you swiftly swatted out of the way by irritable commuters, but just by toning down the nagging sense that you have to do more, and do it faster, can have plenty of long term benefits.

At least that’s the belief of journalist and author Carl Honoré, a man whose own slow life epiphany came when he found himself speed reading bedtime stories to his son. His book “In Praise of Slow” champions the benefits of taking more time to consider things.

“We live in a world that is obsessed with speed that is stuck in fast forward. We often lose sight of the damage that this road-runner form of life does to us -- on our health, our diet, our work,” he said.

Slowing, not slacking

Resist the tug of technology: turn off your mobile, don’t send that email just yet and try and forget, just for a few minutes, about the thousand tedious tasks that you feel need to be done.

The stigma attached to slowing down equates it with an idleness at odds with the dominant work ethos of always doing more and doing it faster.

As well as the slow food movement, there are slow towns, aiming to improve the quality of life for inhabitants and making them more pleasant places to live. It’s more a philosophical statement rather than a directive.

“But why slow down when you can multi-task,” you might ask? Well, multi-tasking is a flawed skill and there’s been plenty of scientific research to prove it. “Multi-tasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes,” David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan, told the New York Times. “Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information.”

That’s not to say that people who have trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time are more enlightened, but most people who have juggled a number of tasks at the same time won’t need scientific research to confirm that by doing many things at once, you’re less likely to do any of them well.

3 Tips to live a slow life

1. Drink more tea -- making a cup of tea is the perfect pursuit and displacement activity to idly consider absolutely nothing and everything. Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu called it an essential ingredient in the elixir of life, so it can’t be bad.

2. Walk more -- what could be better than moving at a pace nature intended and getting some fresh air round your chops. You’ll see much more than by taking public transport or driving.

3. Realize that time is nothing more than an abstract concept used to measure the distance between to points, it’s futile and pointless to even consider ‘beating’ it, so don’t try.

Written by Dean Irvine for CNN