Stop and smell the flowers

In the 2004 Olympic Games, I remember vaguely an Australian athlete in an interview summed up his philosophy in life and sports : “Whatever you do, you can always do it faster”.

Do we want to or should we be speeding through the years we are given to spend on this earth? A sped-up life is a half lived life. We hurtle from home to work, through traffic jams, quick meals at McDs, home cooked meals shoved into a microwave, mobiles stalking us at every turn. We schedule and cram full our days to within an inch of our life. Then we fall into bed each night frizzled and harrassed, grabbing a few hours sleep before the rush hour next morning marks the start of the cycle all over again.

Our world has not shrunk yet we keep hearing people say “what a small world”. The world is the same size – it’s just that we speedfreaks hare all over the surface with unseemly haste – missing life as it were, oblivious to subtle details around us. The result is a world that we perceive has been contracted down to a little park size.

So let us slow down the acceleration of life. Let us downshift a high income lifestyle in favour of an existence whose pleasures are simpler. We don’t need to keep up with anyone, anything. We can be just who we are.