The alarm clock rings a second time and I jump out of bed. It is 6:15 on January 2 of the new year and I tell myself that I have already lost fifteen minutes of my “valuable” day. I run to the shower; I run while having a quick breakfast gathering the things I need for work; I run to get to the radio We do everything by running today and, as I see it in newspapers and interviews, everyone is the same: we squeeze the days in a race towards I don’t know what goal and, even so, the minutes of our days are still scarce.
Immersed in a world obsessed with speed, we specialize in getting more and more done in the shortest time possible. Before we dialed numbers, now we do everything with one button. We used to walk, now we walk fast. We used to read, now we download speed reading texts.
What comes in instant packaging saves our lives, from coffee to 10-minute meditation courses. They call us our parents, children, friends and we have the courage to give them just a small portion of that time-we-don’t-have. And for what speed, I wonder. Since when do you have more degrees, do more things, know all languages, be good or good in the discipline that comes to mind … does it assure you happiness? I don’t think it even ensures your life.
On this special day, when 2021 barely takes a few beats after gently expelling 2020 from our lives, I want to ask you to stop. Let’s brake for a second. Brake.
Think about it. We were promised that technology would work for us and that we would be happier, but there are statistics that show that we work 200 more hours a year than in 1970 and vital dissatisfaction and speed define our time.
Hyperactivity leads us to live by inertia … and that is why the years are no longer sets of days but just minutes, or moments, that we are burning towards the goal to reach who knows what. We are slaves of schedules, schedules, noise, consumption … slaves of the mortgage that we take out to pay for up to 30 years from now, of the cruise that we paid for two years before so that 2020 would arrive and throw you overboard … . of the new model of the car that must be changed every year, or at least every so often. And in this country, we turn ourselves into slaves of the dollar, the currency of a foreign power that should have nothing to do with the price of a kilo of milanesa or soybean oil … since we are producers of all that raw material .
Speed. Goals always unattainable. Clocks increasingly smaller in size but more tyrants in mandate.
Carl Honor, the sociologist who gave birth to the PRAISE OF SLOWNESS, says that living racing infiltrates us in such a way that we hardly perceive how it affects every aspect of our lives – our health, our diet, our work, our relationships. , the environment and our community.
Honor believes that the essence of the speed at which we are going through life has a much deeper reason than consumerism or technology … and it is how we perceive time itself. “In the East, time is cyclical, they see it moving in great circles without haste, always renewing and refreshing. But in the West, time is linear. A finite resource that is always draining,” he says.
The Slow Philosophy is rapidly gaining adherents in Europe, where the most demanding schools, recognized in the world, are taking hours of study from stressed children from an early age: who study double time and also do high-performance sports, who study English, theater, painting and even technology in his spare time.
For what? Parents are raising their critical voice at this measure, angry because they believe that this will lead to failure for their children … and yet the psychopedagogue has discovered that Western children do not need more languages, but to spend time with their family and friends. They do not need to meet demanding criteria, but they lack spark, wit, laughter, creativity.
Honor – turned into guru of the slow movement – asserts that speed makes us live in increasingly isolated bubbles.
Well, if we have to guard against 2020, which showed us a world in which the most fanciful fictions of comics like Nippur or El Tony … can become reality.
Reconnect … talk with others, look those next to you in the eye. Take a deep breath, smile inward and then from the inside out … just make the effort. Set less rigid goals and you will see that you meet your objectives anyway … but that the path is conscious, well walked, well chewed.
I, for my part, wish you a year of lost time. You don’t even have to think about it, you have to feel it.
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