Living
La Vida Slowly
Are
you losing something living at top-notch speed? The cost of
not taking the time to smell the roses can be monumental.
Our images of success have a video-like format—snippets
of a day spent at top speed. A smiling woman waking up dawn
(with suspiciously too much energy), elbowing her way through
traffic to her successful job, smiling at the gym, smiling at
the grocery store, smiling through dinner and then finishing
off her evening in sexy lingerie smiling for her partner.
In
this era of quantity over quality where instantaneous wins over
slow, should we be worried? No one wants to be late for their
flight, or have a slow Internet connection. But would you really
like to tell your son the fast track version of Snow White?
Or be so busy that you don't seen the moon for months at a time?
Is
our haste always justified? What’s the cost of so much
hustling?
The
Disease of Time
In 1982, Larry Dossey, an American physician, coined the term
the disease of time to describe the compulsive belief that “time
goes away from you, that there is not enough of it, and that
you have to pedal faster just to keep up.”
His
theory gave way to the birth of an international movement called
“Slow Food.” In the beginning, the Slow Food Movement
was a culinary practice –slow food– based on the
premise that you should ingest home cooked meals as opposed
to fast junk food.
Nowadays,
the slow groove is being applied to sex, travel and life in
general. Living "La Vida slowly" is offering a way
for people to slow down and include the things that enrich their
lives.
Slowing
Down
“Being slow means to control the rhythm of your life and
decide what speed is convenient in a certain context. If I want
to go fast today, I’ll go fast. If tomorrow I want to
go slowly, I’ll go slowly. We are fighting for the right
to establish our own time”, said Carlo Petrine, the founder
of the Slow Food Movement.
The
Slow Movement ask us to looks at critical components in our
lives and decide if the time saved is actually worth it. That
prepackaged soup may only take eight minutes in the microwave
as opposed to the 15 minutes needed to cut and peel ingredients
for homemade soup. What’s a better time investment in
the end?
How
would your life change is you could accommodate your own schedule
to include moments of happiness, something a simple as gazing
at the moon or lingering over a homemade dinner?
Living
La Vida Slowly Tips
* Enjoy the process as well as the goals.
* When traveling, try to get to know each place deeply. Say
no to scheduled itineraries and yes to long walks.
* When making love, mandatory speeding is banned. Slow sex practitioners
prefer variations close to Tantrum or Tao over three-minutes-in
the elevator-Hollywood-type sex.
* If feasible, prepare your own meals. Avoid cans, instant meals,
hamburgers and franchise pizzas.
* Use only environmentally friendly products. For example, prefer
your bicycle over your car.
* When you find yourself thinking there’s isn’t
enough time to do everything, take a breath and slow down.
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