Slow is Radical

"They paved paradise to put up a parking lot." --Joni Mitchell

Our class spent some time reading a book by Richard Register called Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature. It was an interesting and radical read, despite its ability to put some people off with its angry tone and seemingly impossible ideas of drastically altering the way we live, work, and move within cities.

Given Loki's death last week and the message of Register's book, I've been thinking about how attached to and dependent upon cars most of our cities are and how cars encourage our desire for speed and distance. Register attests that 15 mph is a speed at which it's almost impossible to hurt oneself or others, and I think about this in relation to our neighborhood speed limit of 30 mph (which is regularly broken by people driving down our street). A car at 15 mph would likely have had time to stop before hitting my cat.

All in all, slowing down seems to be a concept foreign to most of our culture, but the recent resurgence of popularity in "slow arts" such as knitting, baking, gardening, and cooking from scratch attests to the fact that many of us desire to slow down and fully take in the moments and contexts of our lives. These slow arts compete with mass produced clothing, fast food restaurants, and pre-packaged processed foods because we are used to convenience and to living at the speed of a TV commercial.

What would it take for us to slow down a bit? Likely, we would need to change our habit of packing in as many activities and errands as we can into the shortest possible time span. We would need to refrain from multi-tasking in many areas of our lives. Maybe we would need to do less in a day, make fewer demands of ourselves. We would probably need to watch less TV, freeing up time to cook a meal or take a walk. We would need to practice mindful awareness of our day-to-day doings. We would need to take a moment to breathe. We would have the time to follow the speed limit.

In doing this, we might find ourselves less stressed, less rushed, and even with more time to dedicate to the things that matter to us. We might begin to recognize how constant motion can work against contentment and begin to see the paradise beyond the pavement.