Man is not himself only, he is all that he sees, all that flows to him from a thousand sources, he is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys. Mary Austin
The body is the world. Alan Watts
'Slowness' as a term to describe a way of being-in-the-world is perhaps confusing. It implies being 'slow', but what is 'being slow'? How does one actually be slow? What is 'slow'?
Fundamentally, 'being slow', if anything, is about denying the dictates of 'modern life', about renouncing 'ambition' and the pressure of 'doing'. It is about stepping outside of a manufactured time whilst embracing the freedom of Time as a whole. It is about allowing one's natural rhythms to shine through whilst allowing the seasons to penetrate. And allowing one's own trajective energy (walking as opposed to driving for example) to body one forth. Being slow is about allowing oneself the essential space and time to cultivate a mind clear enough to see through the illusions of the ruling modes of thought. Being slow, then, is thus a 'coming to one's senses', and a re-evaluation of what it means to be human, and to world.
No longer hostage to the rush and roar of speed, one begins to see things afresh and to re-cognize connections that had hitherto passed one by. This process of re-cognition, enabled through our new-found slowness, is vital to the blossoming of the self into its matrix of relations.
Being slow then becomes a process of revitalising oneself and becoming healthy again; it is about 'knowing with again' (re-co-gnize), and recognizing that 'The ‘with’ is not just a mode of being-in-the-world, but our transcendental condition' [Jean-Luc Nancy]; it is about reinserting the self into its greater natural matrix from which it has been unnaturally extracted. 'Civilization,' Freud reminds us, 'has arisen out of the renunciation of instinct, the gaining of control over the forces of nature, and the building of a cultural superego'.
Being slow is about re-evaluating what it means not just to be human, but to be individual as 'undivided' and not as 'atomised'. It is culture true and pure, about realizing one's self as part of Nature and not apart from it.
In cultivating this clarity, we slowly begin to see the self as a flowing open system whose tenuous envelope of skin and bone is not so much a barrier as an invitation. 'Inner and outer' as a concept no longer makes sense. 'Electrically and chemically', the biologist John Bliebtreu announces, 'the world moves right through us as though we were made of mist'.
World and self merge. Synergies abound.
Through the process of being slow, the organism becomes more intimately integrated with its environment. Nature becomes one as one becomes Nature. And one is naturally drawn to nature through being slow and undistracted. One's self-interest naturally expands to encompass that of the environment, and, by extension, further beyond.
It is like this that by changing one's self, and by 'slowing' down, one changes the world...
World and self merge. Synergies abound.
Through the process of being slow, the organism becomes more intimately integrated with its environment. Nature becomes one as one becomes Nature. And one is naturally drawn to nature through being slow and undistracted. One's self-interest naturally expands to encompass that of the environment, and, by extension, further beyond.
It is like this that by changing one's self, and by 'slowing' down, one changes the world...
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