In Praise of Slowness

Arianna Huffington has a new book club. 

The first choice is an interesting one: In Praise of Slowness.

 

"The deeper I got into the book, the more I realized that I had had a towering example of the joys and benefits of slowness right in front of me for most of my life: my mother.

As I wrote in a column shortly after her death in 2000, she and I had an unspoken deal: hers would be the rhythm of a timeless world, a child's rhythm; mine was the rhythm of the modern world. While I had the sense every time I looked at my watch that it was later than I thought, she lived in a world where there were no impersonal encounters, and never a need to rush.

"The last time my mother was upset with me," I wrote, "was when she saw me talking with my children and opening my mail at the same time. She despised multi-tasking. She believed it was a way to miss life, to miss the gifts that come only when you give 100 percent of yourself to a task, a relationship, a moment."

Read more here.