It has been months since I have posted – but that is what happens when one thinks slowly.

For three months I have nothing that I had to think about.  Three months of day-by-day life, no job, no projects to be completed, no deadlines to meet – and for much of that time, solitude.

And what is there to show for it?  Well – nothing really.  But yet a lot.  Things have slowed down, there was time to complete thoughts, and time to be surprised by thought.

But more than all that,  there has been time to dis-engage from the things that fill  my life, time to let those things drift.  Time to re-discover some of the things that have always mattered to me, yet have become marginal to my life -  and to begin to imagine how I could live my life true to those things.

Since I read the ‘Club of Rome’ report in the 1970s I have expected doom and gloom, social and environmental apocalypse.  Rather than retreat to the hills, or become a hippie, I have pursued a professional life, presented as a classic middle-class person…but alongside that, learnt to spin and weave (wheel and loom now gone), grown food, and wanted to  ensure that I had the means/skills to survive, with my loved ones, should things fall apart.

And now the world is looking more and more fragile – and I am recalled to where I started.  Local sustainable means of production, especially of food.

I am back home with lots of ideas, and a new set of priorities -  to become more skilled at saving seeds,  to find ways to make our block of land more economically productive, and to find ways to work with other small-block owners so that farming can be productive in New Zealand without needing to get to the massive scale of so many of our farms.  The walnut orchard is great, and growing, but it will be a few years yet before it produces income flow, so I need to find some additional approaches…

The challenge will be to sustain this focus, when I am also very aware of the need to generate an income flow, and a professional job is the most effective way to do so…But such jobs can so easily become all absorbing, and take the focus from what really matters…

Is it possible to sustain a slow-thinking clarity about life and what matters, while also working at a demanding job? or does the job become the thing against which all else is prioritised?  Time will tell…

New site at www.slowplanet.com. Carl Honore creating a hub for slow travel, slow design, slow sport (almost seems contradictory, but I remember enjoying a slow game of croquet at times…), and slow work. All very new and fresh but worth monitoring.

So many people I met with last year were busy

• busy with deadlines, and immediate demand, and deliverables and urgent things
• too busy to do what they actually thought was not only important, but also more interesting – thinking.

So with a good group of people (Graeme, Jane, Paul) the ’slow thinking movement’ started.

“Movement’ may be a bit of an exaggeration – but all things have to begin somewhere…

It is of course, in part, inspired by the slow food movement (of which I am a great fan).

But more than that, it comes out of some work I was doing where people seemed hungry for opportunities to put aside the immediate demands of life and look at the bigger picture, have conversations that did not have a pre-determined purpose, and talk with people that were living and working in a different space/sphere.

And when we did that, found time for those conversations that allowed us to make connections, ruminate, discover what other people were up to or thinking about – then it turned out to be really interesting, and mind-expanding, and stimulating, and fun. Our worlds all got bigger.

That all happened in a work context (navigator network), – but we decided to try it in a non-work context. So the first formal event happened – 8 people invited for a slow meal, and asked to bring one thing they wanted to talk about with people they may not have met before. We deliberately asked people who lived and worked in quite different areas, and people we knew were good listeners and talkers…

Everyone got a chance to introduce their topic for a couple of minutes, then we moved into the meal, and just began talking… Easy as that.

Some hours later they all went home, with the suggestion that they think about repeating the format themselves with others…