It is great to be noted by Carl Honoré at Slow Planet.

Carl Honoré: First impressions, and the next step….

We’ve already heard from Slow initiatives that weren’t even on our radar before. For instance, I love the sound of these Slow Thinking events in New Zealand.

Carl’s website leads with a good clarification of ’slow’:

Slow is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace; it’s about working, playing and living better by doing everything at the right speed.

This applies as much to thinking as to other aspects of life. The genious of the Slow Thinking Movement is that we use a simple way of getting people together to help each other think better by thinking at the right speed.

Dr David Suzuki has written recently on the need for revaluing time in our thinking. He reflects on the “cacophony of demands for attention” assaulting us.

… perhaps it’s time we revisit this obsession with speed. Never before has there been a greater need for some heavy thinking before action.

Suzuki comments on the role of technology and the media in seeming to diminish or eliminate the role of time in nature and processes; “we’ve edited out the most important aspect of the ecosystem: Time.”

It’s time we reconsider the role of time in our decisions and our technologies. Maybe we all need to slow down, take time to read, think, exchange ideas and deliberate questions of who we are, where we come from, where we are heading and what life is all about. If not now, when?

The slow thinking approach is one attempt to promote the kind of exchange, questioning, and thinking that Suzuki may be suggesting. By providing a simple structure for people to bring together their ideas and experience with enough time and with a commitment to mutually exploring, examining and developing thinking, slow thinking offers an antidote to the ‘once over lightly,’ sound-bite culture of our society.

Thanks to No Time to Lose for alerting me to the piece by Suzuki.

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…