What's the hurry?

In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore HarperSanFrancisco. 310 pages. $24.95.

Carl Honore recognizes the buzz speed induces. And that s why his book In Praise of Slowness is worth reading. He's not some Luddite who curses the invention of e-mail and BlackBerrys. Nor is he a hippie urging us to go back to the land and to the natural rhythms of country life. Honore is a busy Londoner trying to figure out how to take the hurry out of bedtime stories with his son. He has found a way: slowness.

Honore tells of a "backlash against speed that is moving into the mainstream." From schools to offices, at hospitals and gyms, in kitchens and bedrooms, "people are refusing to accept the diktat that faster is always better," he writes. "And in their many and diverse acts of deceleration lie the seeds of a global Slow movement."

But "movement" implies a coherence that proponents of slowing down lack. There are no international headquarters, no leaders, no coordination, not even a website. Many people opt to slow down without feeling part of a global campaign. That doesn't trouble Honore. "Every act of deceleration gives another push to the Slow movement," he says.

Grassroots groups are cropping up worldwide. Japan's Sloth Club, Europe's Society for the Deceleration of Time, and the U.S.'s Take Back Your Time coalition advocate an unhurried approach to life.

Some pro-Slow organizations focus on a particular element of life. The Slow Food movement, based in Italy, promotes "the very civilized notion that what we eat should be cultivated, cooked, and consumed at a relaxed pace," writes Honore. Advocates believe that we can eat well and save the planet.

The Slow Food manifesto says it all: "Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes, and forces us to eat Fast Food."

Italy is also home to the Slow Sex movement. "If you look around the world, there is a growing desire to slow down," founder Alberto Vitale tells Honore. "In my opinion, the best place to start is in bed."

Honore digs into other topics, too. He lifts weights under the guidance of Ken Hutchins, creator of the SuperSlow weightlifting regimen. "The modern mentality is that doing something slowly means it's not intense or productive--and that applies to exercise, too," Hutchins says. "People think that unless you are performing a frenzied activity like aerobics you're not getting any benefit. But actually the opposite is true. It is the slowness that makes exercise so productive."

Honore goes on to catalogue other offshoots: Slow Cities (also based in Italy), Slow Schooling, which emphasizes creativity in children over test scores, and Europe's attempts at shortening the workweek. There's even a Tempo Giusto movement of classical musicians who believe conductors should slow down.

The author is enthusiastic about what he's found. But he also sees its obstacles. "I want to slow down without being bullied into finding God or embracing crystals and astrology," he writes.

Is slowing down a luxury for the affluent? Honore doesn't have an answer. Most of the workers who are gaining control over work schedules are white collar. France's labor laws limiting work to thirty-five hours a week has not been without significant problems. The author suggests legislation may be necessary to affect all workers, but he doesn't give specific examples. President George W. Bush does like to take long weekends--if only his adjustment of overtime laws could have given people more time, rather than less money.

But some ways of slowing down don't cost a penny. Dinner at the table instead of in front of the TV is free. A home-cooked meal is more nutritious and economical than takeout. Limiting your kids' scheduled activities could save money.

People like to stay busy, and the pro-Slow movement will have to confront that. We confuse a full calendar with full and meaningful lives. It is easy to think that if we are busy, we must be important. Running from one activity to the next allows us to escape the gnawing feeling of emptiness that can plague modern life.

Honore posits that the biggest challenge is our neurotic relationship with time itself. The Industrial Revolution fundamentally altered people's connection to time. "To teach workers the new time discipline demanded by modern capitalism, the ruling classes set about promoting punctuality as a civic duty and a moral value, while denigrating slowness and tardiness as cardinal sins," he writes. And here we are, 100 years later, with high productivity and not enough vacation time, checking our e-mail at midnight.

Honore is a gifted storyteller, making the book a pleasure to read. A journalist by trade, he directs his reporter's eye on details. His description of his arrival at a tantric sex workshop is hilarious. A workshop assistant greets people at the door. "He is in his thirties and has a crooked smile and a ponytail," the author writes. "He wears a white vest and cream-colored yoga trousers and smells strongly of armpit. He reminds me of the host of a particularly toe-curling Tantra video I have seen. My heart sinks." Still, he enjoyed the session.

This Londoner is game for everything. I would have been interested to see what didn't work.

He also limits his purview to Europe, Japan, and the U.S. Developing nations are rarely mentioned, unfortunately.

But his balanced philosophy makes sense. "Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for," he writes. "Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto--the right speed."

In a recent thought-provoking article entitled "Time for Bread and Roses," John de Graaf takes up where Honore left off. De Graaf is also the editor of Take Back Four Time, another book that delves into how to put the brakes on the breakneck speed of modern life.

In "Time for Bread and Roses," de Graaf writes about a coalition of groups that are proposing a "Time to Care" national public policy initiative. Recommendations include guaranteed paid childbirth for all parents; guaranteed one-week paid sick leave; three weeks of paid annual vacation for all workers; and limits on compulsory overtime.

"Each of these legislative points, if adopted, would only bring the U.S. closer to standards already in place in most other industrial countries, and in many poorer countries," writes de Graaf. It could also spark conversations about living wages and universal health care.

It's easy to scoff at the idea of time poverty or of the need to slow down. Given the current Administration's attempts to dismantle the social safety net and turn back the clock on labor laws, concerns about the hectic pace of life fall pretty far down on the list of progressive priorities.

But this hasn't always been the case. "Once, led by organized labor and enlightened church leaders, American progressives were champions for more time," writes de Graaf.

Women have played a crucial role in the development of worker-friendly programs like flex-time, parental leave, and job sharing. And they played a similar role in the past. Nearly 100 years ago, women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, demanded bread and roses, too.

"Bread and roses, symbols of the two important sides of life: bread, the money to live, and roses, the time to enjoy life--higher wages and shorter hours," writes de Graaf. "But somewhere along the line, we got 'bread and butter' unionism focused solely on wages. The roses were left to will."

Along with bread and butter, we need time to plant and pick and prune and smell the roses.

Elizabeth DiNovella is Culture Editor of The Progressive. John de Graaf's article "Time for Bread and Roses" can be read online at http://www.alternet.org/story/20786.