Slowly does it - the way to live

Evolving out of today's fast-paced lifestyle is a movement dedicated to taking it easy and relaxing. JOHN McCRONE takes a look.

I hope you are sitting comfortably with the paper fanned across the kitchen table, fresh-brewed coffee and a home-baked scone at hand. The house is quiet and Saturday stretches endlessly before you. All your unhurried attention can be devoted to the task of reading. Time is your friend.

But no, you are probably already impatient. Get on with it. Quit stalling. Look buster, it's gone 8am and there are kids to ferry to netball; a power walk and shopping for a dinner party to fit in by lunchtime. The weekend-chore clock is ticking loudly.

We have more leisure time these days. That is a surprising statistic. Yet even our time off can now feel like work crammed with a series of activities at which we must excel, which must be as impressive as they are varied.

There is a feeling of being harried, a desire for time out, deceleration. But how to achieve it?

That dreadful management phrase, striking a work/life balance, is useless. It does not tell us anything. We need a more concrete image of how we can get from here to there.

Which explains the sudden international appeal of the slow living movement something that has grown out of the slow food and slow city movement of Italy.

Slow food. Ahh, immediately you are thinking of a steaming peasant stew of lamb shanks and white beans, or an old-fashioned Sunday roast with all the trimmings melting and crusted with fat.

The slowness is not just about the care and the cooking times, but about using local, in-season ingredients. Food paced to the rhythms of the land. Slow food is also about being at a table surrounded by friends and family no-one fidgeting with their cellphones or in a hurry to be off elsewhere. Dining paced to the rhythms of conversation and digestion.

What about slow cities? Again you can just imagine those languorous Mediterranean fishing ports and hill-top towns. Narrow cobbled alleys, shady cafes, the tinkling town square fountain, the laughter of school children, stray cats grouped in a shaft of sunlight.

OK, let's not get too schmaltzy. But in Italy there is now an official Cittaslow accreditation. You can be badged a slow city if you have a population under 50,000 and the right slow practices of cutting noise and traffic, fostering neighbourliness, building green spaces, supporting local shops and producers.

The Italians are celebrating slow. And they don't see any contradiction with their celebration of fast in the form of Ferraris and Vespas. Slow is about quality, local distinctiveness and connectedness as much as it is about the pace of life.

The concept of slow is striking a chord right round the world. In Australia, towns like Goolwa and Katoomba have signed up to Cittaslow.

In Britain there are Mold, Diss and Ludlow. Even countries like South Korea are eager to join in.

Then there has been the crop of bestsellers, such as Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow, and websites like slowmovement.com, which have been expanding the slow philosophy to all walks of life.

Slow architecture: buildings of quality materials which embody the notion of "petrified silence".

Slow travel: house swaps and rented villas in out-of-the-way locations. Not "do nothing" beach holidays but a chance to mix with locals, absorbing their quieter rhythms and lifestyle.

Slow design: buying knives and frying pans made to last. Trading disposable for substantial.

Slow sport: the shift to yoga, tai chi, pilates, superslow gym training. Calming as well as strengthening body motion.

Slow sex: well, we will just mention Sting's boast of eight-hour tantric sessions (which, thankfully, he has admitted was a drunken joke) and move right along.

The slow-living movement has evoked a tremendous response because the imagery comes with a sense of the achievable. Someone once lived the rustic village life, so it should be possible to recapture some of those principles even in Ashburton or Merivale.

But is slow anything more than a yearning, an idea that captures our busy attention for a short moment, or the harbinger of some genuine social change? Some believe time is definitely up for the Western economic model of ever faster consumption, ever faster production the shortening of the step from input to output until, like a fast food hamburger, there is no longer room for thought, care or substance in the act of living.

 

Geoffrey Craig, politics lecturer at University of Otago and co-author of Slow Living, says that with the threat of global climate change and now spiralling food and oil prices, as a society we really have reached a crisis point. It may be starting down south and in the countryside first, but Kiwis are casting around for a true alternative lifestyle.

Craig is also organiser for Slow Food Otago and says it is notable he has as many greenie as foodie members. And they seem to be on the same page.

"It's not about some return to an agrarian utopia where people can escape from the realities of modern living. That's not what slow food, and the slow living movement as a whole, is about.

"Instead, the challenge is to renegotiate living in that context of a global capitalist society," Craig says.

Jill Caldwell, another Dunedinite, runs the trend-spotting market researcher Windshift Communications. She says there was a clear tipping point a couple of years back crystallised by Al Gore's climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

It became obvious the issues for individuals and society were really the same says Caldwell. The pace of human activity has got so out of scale that the planet itself needs to find a work/life balance.

The message has even reached Auckland's North Shore she says.

"I was there having my hair done at the weekend. My hairdresser was a classic North Shore woman but she said `I'm sick of all this crap I'm buying. I want to save more.'

"`I can get a Nom*D top on Trade Me for $180. That's much better than $500 in the shop. And it's kind of recycling, isn't it?'."

Caldwell laughs, but says it is a sign of changing attitudes. Thrift is the new black. People are hankering for eco-frugality even if they are not quite sure what it will mean yet. Slow appeals because of the way it puts both saving your sanity and saving the world in the same basket.

We have been here before of course. There was the hippy movement dropping out of the rat race in search of personal freedom. Then there was the New Age movement discovering the slow in other cultures like Zen Buddhism. For every era, there is someone who wants to apply the brakes.

Go back to ancient Rome, 200BC, when believe it or not, the Umbrian playwright Titus Maccius Plautus was protesting the tyranny of sun-dials.

"Who in this place set up a sun-dial, to cut and hack my days so wretchedly into small portions," wrote Plautus with savage bitterness.

So the quiet and connected country town seems the current secret dream for the suburban downshifter, a sustainable, green, alternative replacing previous fantasies about the tropical island, four-hectare lifestyle block, or hippy-dippy commune. Yet the Italian village model could be just another passing fad.

Putting the eco issues aside, a big question is whether the feeling of being harried, a life accelerating out of control, is more perception than reality. We may think the pace of life has got faster, but we could simply be expecting the daily round to be too easy. Or else striving to fit in too much.

The time use research community don't you just love academics: there are now associations, conferences and journals of time use research; indeed, Statistics New Zealand is about to launch into a national time-use survey to find out exactly how Kiwis fill their days finds it hard to agree.

Sociologist Michael Bittman of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, says some speculate that the baby boom generation has a distorted view of what is normal.

Those born in the 1950s and '60s grew up in an unusual era of at-home mums and high expectations that the future would be a place of leisure. With robots to do all the work, the danger was we would have too much spare time and get bored.

Bittman says mentally we may be bench-marking ourselves against an exceptional time in history.

Another factor, he says, is that those people aged in their 40s and 50s are almost bound to be caught in a sandwich of responsibilities. They are likely to have both children and aged relatives to care for.

It is also the time of life when community roles naturally accumulate. Someone has to chair the local school board or fundraise for Plunket.

So a lot of people might be complaining about time pressures because a lot of people are around the same age.

However, Bittman says there is evidence of an actual acceleration. Time use statistics show that working hours took off back in the 1980s as women joined the workforce and dual-income families became the norm.

Work hours have since plateaued, but then there has been a second cultural shift to do with leisure hours and parenting.

The figures show we have slightly more leisure time than we use to. But mainly because we have cut back sharply on the cooking, cleaning and other domestic duties. We either hire help or let the house go.

Instead, the middle classes have taken to packing their free time with mind and body-improving activities a phenomenon dubbed "cultural voraciousness".

A weekend pottering in the garden or slumbering in a hammock has become almost unimaginable for many. Leisure hours are timetabled for book-club meetings, public lectures and gallery openings. Exercise has a new seriousness once the goal becomes a triathlon or big-name bike race.

Children have found themselves on a similar treadmill of after-school dance classes, band practices and individualised maths lessons.

Each activity seems valuable in itself. Collectively however, they become tough on family co-ordination.

Bittman says parenting has also fallen prey to this need to excel. One really significant statistic in time-use studies is the extra hours fathers now spend with their young kids.

"If I ask men what it means to be a good father, they all talk about developing a relationship with their children. It's not just about providing the money to support them the sort of things fathers used to say."

While men want to do a better job at home, women likewise are having to make a real commitment to their careers. With the bar being raised on every front, Bittman says it is easy to understand why professional couples with children report being the most time-stressed.

There are other subtle psychological pressures making matters even worse.

The proliferation of consumer choice is a time curse. Once we have 50 television channels, there are always going to be 49 other channels we are not viewing.

And no amount of channel-clicking can soothe the itch of these missed opportunities.

The same goes for the dazzling variety of travel, hobby, sporting, cultural and socialising options that are now on offer, Bittman says.

All that choice contributes to the feeling of not managing to get enough done in the hours available to us.

The modern world certainly seems unsympathetic of slackers. And hence the allure of slow. It asserts there is a human need for quality over quantity, that there is such a thing as a natural pace of life.

Of course, fast can be fun too. There is room for Vespas and Ferraris. But we like control over pace, the feeling there is time for things to be done properly.

Surprisingly, time management experts offer a similar diagnosis.

Robyn Pearce, Auckland-based mother of six, international speaker and author of Getting a Grip on Time, says the biggest misconception about time management is that it is about how to speed up and do more.

"But if you keep push, push, pushing all the time to fit more things in, you become less effective."

Instead, says Pearce, the keys to time management are streamlining and prioritising learning when to say no.

Her first advice is a tidy-up and this applies as much at home and in your social life as your workplace.

Clear away the clutter so the priorities become obvious. Next make lists of what needs to be done, what matters most to you. Then the tough part is to develop the habit of always tackling those important tasks first.

"It's counter-intuitive to start with the hardest things. Most people will go for the quick, easy, tick off the list. They'll start the day by checking their email because they feel once they get this sort of thing out of the way, they will be free to start on the more time-consuming chores."

However, Pearce says delaying means the big stuff becomes squeezed by deadlines or never even reached. And nothing creates a sense of time pressure as much as knowing you are procrastinating.

It may be an overly structured approach for some, agrees Pearce. However, if we live in a society that wants to accelerate us, push us ever faster, we have to find ways to step aside from its urgent flow.

"Out of structure comes freedom," she says.

Which again is the appeal of the philosophy behind slow. It is about changing both self and society.

Craig says being green used to be associated with thoughts of retreat and sacrifice. You escaped to the lonely hills, giving up the joys and luxuries of modern life.

Slow living is instead the rediscovery of locality and community, learning to appreciate the simpler pleasures which are also going to be the sustainable pleasures.

It could still all just be this year's pipe dream.

Yet many Kiwis seem to agree we need more slowness in our lives. And we need it fast.

- © Fairfax NZ News