The cult of speed or the cult of noise? Maybe what we need is a Listening Revolution rather than a Slow Revolution...
Last week I took a long lunch break. I walked across London to attend a lunchtime lecture at the RSA entitled "The Slow Revolution." Transport for London had warned me that walking would take approximately 52 minutes, so I was pretty pleased when I calculated that I had done it in 36 minutes. Still, the man at the reception felt the need to point out to me that the lecture had started 9 minutes ago.
As I entered, Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slow, was listing the different Slow movements that emerged over the last few years. From Slow Food to Slow Parenting, and from Slow Medicine to Slow Sex, a number of increasingly broad ranging campaigns advocate that we take a breather and start reconsidering what we value in life.
After this overview Kate Fletcher talked about sustainable fashion. She pointed out the oddity of promoting slowness in an industry based on trends, while highlighting the fact that the issue wasn't intrinsic to fashion, but was the result of a business model based on consumerist values. She proposed that, to achieve sustainability, people in the fashion industry should focus, not just on garments as products, but on implementing alternative political visions, where the whole process of garment making and wearing has positive implications for the resilience of communities.
Then Gervais Williams talked about Slow Finance, and of the importance of reconnecting investors with the projects they are investing in, in order to generate positive outcomes at local levels.
Finally, Deepa Patel, from Slow Down London, introduced her talk by saying something really powerful. She said:
"I'm never going to have this moment again."
I found that really liberating. It reminded me why I had wanted to hear about this slow business in the first place. While all the other speakers had been focused on making sure they used their five minutes to tell as much of their story as they could, she simply used the opportunity to connect with the audience, by reminding us of our greatest commonality: we're all going to die.
Strangely, this realisation that time is precious is probably what is leading us to continually speed up our lives, by investing in ever faster trains, smarter phones, and other conveniently evil technologies. But as one person from the audience noted, maybe we are thinking fast to avoid thinking hard. We create distractions, so that we won't have to face the fact that, well, we're never going to have this moment again.
For me, London is the city that embodies this avoidance. It feels like a really impatient city. Not just physically impatient - I don't mind that, I can see why people would want to spend as little time as possible in the tube - but more frustratingly, intellectually impatient. Maybe it's because I work in the field of innovation, but I feel as if London is always on the verge of embracing a new trend of thought - and rejecting an outdated one. I see this city as a great platform for sharing ideas, but always wonder who really listens to those ideas? I mean really listening, not just being aware of them, not just spreading them, not just embracing them and exhausting them until they are replaced by the next buzzword.
Another notion that was discussed during this not-quite-debate was the one of being connected. The speakers seemed to share the assumption that slowing down implied connecting with others, connecting with the moment, connecting with where our food comes from, connecting with what our body feels, etc. One person from the audience mentioned how technological advances are precisely just about enabling connections, and yet the accent is still on speed. I think the point here though is that the connectedness that the speakers were putting forward is distinct from the connectivity enabled by these new sharing platforms. Connectedness implies depth, connectivity implies breadth (and potentially superficiality). In more conventional terms, connectedness implies quality, connectivity implies quantity.
I think this distinction is important, and brings another notion, which was only alluded at when one of the speakers mentioned that the Slow movement wasn't about slowing down everything, but about doing everything at the right tempo. It's the one of listening. To give everything we do the time it deserves, we have to listen really deeply to what the situation tells us. Similarly, when coming across new ideas, we need to give ourselves the time to really listen to them and understand what they mean. And taking those ideas away from the constant noise of the intellectual city might help us to connect with them more deeply, and interrogate what they really tell us, what they imply for our lives - until they become so embedded that we realise we're only having a dialogue with ourselves. Then we need to turn Twitter back on...