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TwitThisIt's All About Slowing Down
Carl Honoré remembers the exact moment he realized he had lost control of his life. The journalist was rushing through the airport to catch a plane when he spotted an ad for a book series containing one-minute bedtime stories. It seemed the perfect solution for the nightly struggle he was having with his three-year-old son, Benjamin. While Benjamin always wanted to hear just one more story, Honoré wanted to wrap up the ritual as quickly as possible and move on to other things, namely the TV news and e-mail."Rattle off six or seven stories and still finish inside ten minutes -- what could be better?" Honoré recalls thinking. "As I began to wonder how quickly Amazon could ship me the full set, redemption came in the form of a counterquestion: Have I gone insane?"
Honoré spent a year and a half researching and writing In Praise of Slowness, his recent book about our culture's addiction to "more-better-faster" and what people are doing to inoculate themselves against it. The short answer, pithy enough to fit on a bumper sticker, is "Be here now." And how we get there -- or rather, here -- is not as hard as it seems, as Honoré and others have learned.
According to a Gallup Poll conducted last spring, half of the 1,011 Americans questioned said they did not have the time they need to do the things they want. This was particularly true of those with children under 18 and those who work full-time jobs. A major reason is the job. According to the International Labor Organization, a UN agency that promotes human rights, Americans work longer than the famously workaholic Japanese -- roughly two and a half weeks more a year.
Sometimes it's by choice. Corporations are facing "presenteeism," the opposite of absenteeism, said a recent article in The New York Times. Employees who are sick and should be at home are coming to work anyway, fever, chills and all.
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