In praise of slow

(With apologies to Carl Honore for shamelessly liberating the title of his book, which I haven’t read, but respect the sentiment behind the title.)

I sauntered to work today. Tomorrow I might amble, stroll, perambulate or, you know, walk. This is nothing unusual, you might think, but I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon develop over the last few years, and that is the fact that everyone seems to have somewhere more important than the place I’m going to get to, preferably much quicker than I do. As such, as I wander down the street, it’s almost inevitable, even at unsociable hours in the morning, that at least one person will come charging past me – not running, because that would look panicky – but walking at at least twice the speed I do. I don’t walk as slowly as, say, an elderly gentleman, but I still walk considerably slower than these people who are inevitably dressed in some sort of suit, wearing clip-cloppy shoes that immediately makes them somehow seem incredibly arrogant. Quite how shoes can be arrogant is anyone’s guess, but that’s what it makes me think.

Then there’s London. Anyone who’s ever visited London, however much you may have liked it, will have noticed how much of a hurry every damn person in that city is in. Traffic lights go amber and horns sound immediately like some sort of automatic reaction. Dare to stand slightly left-of-centre on the escalators leading down to the Underground and some greased-up City-boy businessman will make a snide comment like “Slow lane’s over there, mate”. Stand in a queue at Pret and you’ll see at least five people who have been waiting roughly fifteen seconds storm out in seeming disgust, muttering about inefficiency. (Contrast this with my experience a few years back when an entire symphony orchestra descended on one tiny kebab shop in the middle of Warsaw which was staffed by one rather uncomfortable looking man. Now that was inefficiency, although to be fair he was somewhat up against the wall. Almost literally.)

Then there’s the laziness of people who use computers. “Why can’t I drag that text into my subject header?” I heard one person ask of an email application – because using two keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste it was obviously just such a hassle. “Why can’t it do this?” “Why doesn’t this do my work for me?” “Computers are supposed to be efficient!”

And then – then – there’s the attention span of people on the Internet. Dare to write in more than one paragraph on a message board and there will be at least one response along the lines of “OMFG WALL OF TEXT” with nothing more meaningful to say. Well, thanks for that.

You’d think there’d be a point to this wall of text. And I guess there is. It’s to say to these people “slow the fuck down”. Leave ten minutes earlier so you can enjoy a walk to work without barging past people. Take your time over writing your emails and they might actually be spelled and punctuated correctly. Read someone’s wall of text and you might actually find something interesting that they had to say. And London? Just climb out of your own arse and realise that some people don’t want to live their lives at 300 miles per hour before dying of a heart attack at 28.

This post is dedicated to the people who take the time to sit down, chill out, relax, enjoy some time, some space and don’t mind being a little bit wordy and pretentious along the way. If you’re reading this and you’ve got this far, chances are you’re one of them. And to you I say, “Good job. Keep it up.”