The Good life is the slow life
Written by Janae Hagen Tuesday, 02 February 2010 08:00
The red light on my BlackBerry keeps blinking, trying to lure me in to see if I have a new text, e-mail or Facebook notification. Like most people, I’m like a bug to a zapper light; I don’t like to see the phone just teasing me with its crimson glow.
People like me annoy me. I can’t carry on a conversation with someone while I’m texting or they’re texting – there’s too much going on to concentrate properly on anything. I usually end up saying out loud what I’m texting or I text whatever I’m trying to say out loud. It just doesn’t work.
Computers are just as bad. Creeping on Facebook has easily taken up five times the amount of time I’ve spent researching anything education-related in the past four years.
Our generation needs to sit still and slow down. We’re over-stimulated by things that shouldn’t be stimulating whatsoever. I mean, why do we find looking at a stranger’s album of a drunken night out on Facebook more intriguing than grabbing a table at the OB with friends and watching that drunken night play out live?
I’ve slowly started implementing more “slow” into my life. Two years ago I started turning my phone to “silent” after 10 p.m. I took a five-month hiatus from my phone entirely when I studied abroad (granted, I had a phone that was way too expensive to use, so it mostly served as an emergency accessory.)
Upon returning to the states, I started blocking out time to prepare meals from scratch and began to realize how much I enjoyed cooking with and for other people. Nothing is better after a stressful day than decompressing over a pot of boiling water and the smell of garlic and olive oil simmering in a pan.
This year I took my slow mission a little further and opted out of having a television in my apartment. I now rely on online radio or silence (my apartment has all sorts of hums – though I don’t hear people, I usually hear water and air getting pushed through the pipes).
The idea of “slow” was brought front and center to my attention over winter break. I found an appealing “slow down” cover of a magazine called “Good” in the magazine section of Barnes and Noble. Nothing bad could be called “Good,” so I snatched it up.
The articles feature farmers and artisans doing things the old-fashioned way, with a smart and sustainable twist. In fact, “Good” is just a collaboration of people and groups doing good things for the planet. The creators wittingly got an Icelandic web domain, which allows their website to read www.good.is.
“Good’s” idea of slow goes beyond cutting back on Facebook and texting time and goes into reducing our consumer waste and doing sustainable things that make us happy.
We all need to live a bit more like flâneurs, the term poet Charles Baudelaire coined to describe the joys of slowly sauntering down a street, taking in all of its details. Realistically, the last thing I want to do in the frigid winter is slowly make my way down Broadway and window shop.
As students, we can emulate Baudelaire’s ideal by adjusting and re-prioritizing our to-do list to include a little bit more time to social well-being instead of the faux “socializing” of Facebook chat, which doesn’t work 90 percent of the time anyway.
Janae is a senior studying journalism.
