The Slow Movement

I wish I could say I chose to wash the dishes by hand out of some romantic “back in the day” nostalgia, or out of some perfectionist sense of immediately drying them so there were no water marks, or out of an industrious impulse to not let a machine do my work for me. But really I washed the dishes by hand last night because I bought the wrong soap for the dishwasher (I also wish I could say I realized that before trying to use it, but this was a mistake learned after the fact unfortunately).

It takes a long time to wash the equivalent of a full load of dishwasher dishes, but because this was not a normal activity it had the feel of a special occasion, or the freshness of something new or different so that I actually quite enjoyed it. But I think I enjoyed it for two other very important reasons as well: 1) using my hands and 2) slowing down.

I equate this to one of my favorite activities, cutting up vegetables. For those of you who know me this will be shocking because I am often too vocal about both my distaste for and discomfort with cooking.  But because I love cutting up vegetables I will cook almost anything that requires me to cut up 3 or more vegetables. I love pulling out the cutting board, laying out the freshly washed vegetables in a row at the top, and then meticulously choosing each vegetable one at a time to either dice or cube or slice or mince.

I love the way the cutting board looks with the remains of vegetable skins and ends on one side and the rainbow array of the innards piled up ready for the pan or pot. I love the feel of holding each vegetable in my hand, the perfect balance of the knife stretched end to end from my hand to the cutting board, the methodical rhythmic action of lifting the knife up and down as it moves along the vegetable.

Despite the inefficiency of it, I never have another part of the meal going while I chop vegetables. This sacred rite of preparation is something I do first, before anything else begins and while nothing else is going on. This way, I do not have to keep track of anything else and I can just lose myself in the methodical slowness of cutting vegetables.

Washing dishes, I discovered, created the same space, and while my hands worked my mind wandered. Not in the frantic way it often does during the day when I’m trying to get five things done at once, but in a meandering, lumbering way. I began to wonder how many other machines have taken away tasks that would allow us to slow down and let our minds wander.

I don’t think I’m advocating a return to the days where we wash our clothes down by the creek (although, wouldn’t this be fun to try one week?). But cutting vegetables and handwashing dishes made me aware once again of the value of slowing down, and how, because of technology, we may need to become more intentional about creating spaces for slowing down.

In a wonderful TED talk by Carl Honre he explores two questions: What made us speed up? And is it possible and even desirable to slow down? His answer in part about why we are such a fast paced culture is profoundly revealing: “speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions, we fill our heads with distractions and busyness so we don’t have to ask…” and here you can fill in any of the big “life” questions or any of the niggling, nagging questions of your own life that you continue to ignore.

My own slowing down experiment over Lent, to sit for one hour a week and do nothing, was a miserable failure. It seems absurd, doesn’t it, that I could not find one hour in 168 to do nothing? With all of the research out now about the benefits of slowing down, including, ironically, increased productivity, better health, better relationships, even better sex, you would think we would all be rushing to slow down.

But, as Honre points out, slow is a dirty word in our culture, synonymous with lazy or stupid. I hope we can begin to change that by having reasonable work hours, by making, or even better yet growing, our own food, by taking time with tasks rather than always multi-tasking.

This is revolutionary concept; it will change how we think about time, how we define success, how we interact with others, and how we look at ourselves. It will, in short, change how we think.

I hope you will take some time today to think about slowness and the ways you might incorporate a good kind of slow in your individual life and start letting the individual choices you make shape the larger culture around you.