INCREASING THE SPEED LIMIT

Recently the police in Germany decided to prosecute a speeding driver despite there being no speed limit. He’d driven his Bugatti supercar at 260 mph down an autobahn doing a selfie of himself and a passenger and cheering . Maybe they’ll do him for being an arrogant idiot instead. 

Speed has been one of the topics of the week. There was the launch of Uptime the app which reduces 3,000 non-fiction books down to 1,200 words each and provides three-point key insights. It’s a tool to reduce the time needed to appear being well-read. It got a lot of coverage. Ann Treneman in The Times said she thought it was an embarrassing idea but was gratified to find that she’d read half of the top 16 books Uptime has filleted. But she said, thinking back she couldn’t remember a thing about any of them. How, she lamented, could she have forgotten every single habit of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. But then she recalled this quote: 

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

I don’t feel well after that. But I feel worse when I hear University students proclaiming they never read a whole book – just the first five pages, five pages in the middle and five pages at the end this plus the copy on the cover and you’ve nailed it. Sorry Jane Austen – you are just “too slow.” Lectures? “I get a friend to record them and then listen to them at three times speed.” Films? “The same.” Music?  “Yeah, that too.” 

Yet whilst everything is fast – speed dating, fast food, speed interviews - something’s missing which meditation is providing. Three people have recently told me about a five-day meditation course they’d been on in Herefordshire with 150 others. Two said it had been life-changing. I gather the third  felt it had changed him - but from being benign into feeling murderously antagonistic.

One obvious way slow comes into its own is cooking. If I never ate fast-food again in my life that wouldn’t be soon enough. In Bra, Italy where the slow-food-movement started in 1989 it was the result of Macdonald’s trying to open a branch. How splendid a rebuff to relentless speed and dollar signs. Ragu to you Ronald. Meanwhile how sad that a much Michelin starred, much feted Paul Bocuse restaurant has closed in Lyons and is being replaced by a Macdonald’s.

I can empathize with young people being in a hurry to gorge themselves on life; I was there myself once. I created an idea to make visiting an art gallery more fulfilling. It comprised selecting the 10 best, most interesting paintings, directing the visitor just to them and for each one writing a reader-accessible commentary and background (none of your Brian Sewell.)  The idea was to intensify the pleasure rather than save time. For many of us a long, comprehensive A to Z visit to a gallery can be like an exhausting and indigestible tasting menu. However, relishing just a few masterpieces can be life changing. 

 Technology has helped make our lives in many ways simpler but also in many ways somehow shallower. The onset of age makes physical speed less comfortable, but we still try to “keep up”. I think it’s time to reinvent the “Slow Movement” but as the “Savour Movement”. Enjoy less stuff but enjoy it more and take much longer doing so.

Life should be less about how many things we do and more about making the experience much more intense …. that’s the main thing.