We live in a world where, as one person put it:
Instant gratification is not quick enough.
Carl finally came to his senses one night when reading to his child from the One Minute Bed-Time Stories. Asked to repeat the story, he became irritated, and wondered if he should order Volume 2 of the series.
Perhaps a new set of stories would satisfy his child?
Suddenly he realised the absurdity of it all. He recalled a golden day in his youth when, sitting in a beautiful, Italian square, he listened on his headphones to Simon and Garfunkel. They urged him to 'slow down, you move too fast, you gotta make the morning last, lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy.' He felt blissful on that sunny day. Now, 20 years later, he wondered why he felt so upset about the airport queue going so slow.
Carl is not against speed, but argues for the appropriate mix of speed and slowness. Creative breakthroughs often come from ‘slow thinking’, he says, rather than ‘fast thinking’. Fast thinking generates the pieces of the jigsaw, but slow thinking is needed to make sense of the whole picture. In Praise of Slow provides some real food for thought. And, he says with irony, he got booked for speeding when driving to a ‘slow supper’ in Italy.
You can find out more about the approach here.
Posted on Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 12:13 am in Books | RSS feed
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