THE ‘SLOW MOVEMENT’

THE SLOW REVOLUTION DRIPS INTO ALL AREAS OF LIFE

A recession is the perfect time to escape the vicious circle of speed which took over our lives, proclaim the ‘Slow Movement’ gurus. The Slow Revolution drips into all areas of live and there is talk about Slow Food, Slow Living, Slow Travel and Slow Sex. Their philosophy is very plausible: In modern live we are cramming as much as possible into every minute and race through live at the cost of health, relationships and the environment. But slowing down in awareness of the preciousness of every minute of our limited lifetime can help us to make our lives more enjoyable and sustainable.

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Philosopher Guttorm Floistad summarizes the relation of Change and Slowness, stating:
“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.”

Journalist, editor and poet Harry Eyres, who writes the Financial Times Slow Lane column, (find the full interview here) told me he believed that it will be very interesting to see whether more people turned to a slower lifestyle in the near future; a reason might be that money, which is the actual driver for many peoples restless lives, all of a sudden appeared not to be as solid as we always reckoned it was.
Rising awareness for Slowness led to the London Slow Down Festival. Curious about the subject I decided to join the Slow Walk, which was only one of the events during such festival.

On Friday, 24th April at around 5pm a group of around 80 people gathered together at the Victoria Embankment near Waterloo Bridge holding signboards, showing a yellow hand with a smiling face, saying Slow Down London, chatting and waiting for the first event of the first Slow Down London to start: A very slow stroll over Waterloo Bridge during rush hour.

Then the crowd started to move. When we reached the bridge it appear to me, that this would be far from a relaxed stroll: the participants of the slow walk where in a visibly good mood, slowly moving forward, whereas a bunch of reporters hastily ran around them with cameras, voice recorders, microphones and other heavy equipment. I hoped they would not come up to me because I did not feel like speaking in front of a camera and had been looking forward to a relaxing walk as the weather that day could not have been nicer: mild, beautiful warm and sunny. Also, as I am normally walking rather quickly I found it rather challenging to go now forward with the speed which would make it difficult to overtake a snail.

I took some pictures of the people and started to chat with the woman walking next to me. She told me she had helped organizing the walk and showed me how to do walking meditation. Then she kind of slowly rushed off to another part of the crowd where she intended to show how to really walk slowly instead of walking fast, standing and waiting a bit and then walking fast again for a bit, as some participants seemed to handle it.

May 18th, 2009 by Christine