Living La Vida Slowly

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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