Slow living

It is not very often that a statement, a beautiful statement made by a person compels you to think. And of latest the term ‘Slow living’, brought to my notice by my Paulo Coehlo obsessed friend, is stirring me to look for its grave definitions and explanations wherever possible.

And till now, I might have gone through some 10-20 web pages related to ‘Slow living’. I had read about numerous movements in my school history books but nowhere could I find the description of slow movement! Slow living has its origins in Slow movement which began in Italy with the concept of Slow food! Who might have thought that here, on this earth exists the world institute of slowness with the motto ‘everything worth doing is worth doing slowly’? It is totally bizarre to think about the paradox of time, “In order to perform fast you have to be slow’. Hard to bear the fact is that summits by the name of ‘Slow Living Summit’ also take place. And Greg Foyster has embarked on a cycling journey with the ‘Changing Gears’. And we have a slow coffee in this world of instant food! Amazing!

All I knew about slow living till now was some catchy lines like ‘living every moment’, ‘achieve your dreams’, ‘consider life an adventure’, ‘you can win if you think you can’, etc. And I had also watched “3 Idiots” which is against the “Life is a race” phrase. My contemplation about slow living would always take me to this. Since childhood we have been taught, we have seen, and we have observed people running everyday to make it for their lives. They get up at 5, spend their day doing monotonous, moribund chores, eat as much as possible, and lament on their lives becoming melancholy. This process repeats with every passing day and they give a damn to what course their life has taken, whether they have achieved what they wanted, or if they are doing what they admire; let alone the thought of increasing their knowledge be. Charles’ Darwin’s theory of ‘survival of the fittest’ rules this world and they synonym fitness to money. They unconsciously use every single minute of their lives in making money. They constantly worry about their job and thrive to provide a good living to the family.

In all this hustle-bustle of life, they are forgetting to enhance personal, community and environmental well-being. They are perhaps failing to introspect. They are forgetting simplicity in the glitter, glamour, and shimmer of the modern life-style. They are forgetting the requirement of ‘survival of the fittest’ theory: “In order to be efficient, productive, and perform fast, you have to have a peaceful mind and for that you require to be slow”.