Faster, Master

Faster, Master

Sunday, July 08, 2007

I have come to realize that the quickening pace of life has something to do with the quickening pace of unhappiness. Thoughtless rat-a-tat of action replaces enjoyment completely, just as junk food fills the stomach but provides no nutrition. It’s pretty clear that the speed of life is not linked at all to its quality. Here are two examples of my own experiments with slowing down the pace of life, and increasing happiness. Slow eating, and even slower reading. Easy for me to say, eh!

In praise of slow eating. Perhaps we eat and read faster to avoid being alone with our thoughts. I usually have a newspaper or some other reading article handy to support the time-wasted in eating. However, I have tried slow eating a few times and find it more enjoyable, but I lose quality reading time. Here’s how. Try looking carefully at your food, and enjoy each morsel. Smell the food and the aroma it creates. Feel the texture of the food against your tongue. Sense the food travel down your gullet and into your stomach. Spend some time thinking about how tomorrow this very morsel will become you!

Devour books slowly too. Hear yourself reading. (Avoid eating while reading, since you’re likely to hear yourself slurping and crunching. Especially while eating crispy things). Keep an ear out for your thoughts which, autonomously, critique and absorb the text. Some thoughts read ahead, while other thoughts leave to handle other pending chores. Listen to yourself think. That’s what reading is all about. The enjoyment from reading comes not from the joy of turning pages, but from the dialogue that our thoughts carry out with the author, and with each other.