I recently discovered that there is a Slow Bicycle Movement. Are you cycling too fast?

While I an not a doctor, I could swear by the healing abilities of slow cycling.  Insolvable problems, mental road blocks, stress - they all seem to disappear while cycling.  You become so absorbed in the new environment that your insecurities quickly dissolve.

Try cycling to get lost.  That’s right: cycle with no plan, no destination, and no expectations.  Cruise and let curiosity abound.

A good time to get lost on your bike is after work.  Take the other route home next time.  After a while, you may find yourself in a new part of town.  Let the streets hypnotize you.  Let the tall trees overwhelm you.  Smell dinner cooking from homes.  On some occasions, you may meet a friendly cat.   On other occasions,  may meet interesting people.

Weekends are also an excellent time to explore on bike.  I recommend Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon.  Just ask yourself: north, east, west, or south?  Why not ask a friend to join you too.

Cycling slowly can renew a sense of appreciation.  Somehow meaning always finds you on the unmapped adventure.  And while you are rejuvenating on the ride, you may even solve that one problem.

For more slow cycling tips, see the Slow Bicycle Movement website.

So many people were asking us for tools on how to live their own slow family life. Others were asking us “what is slow living?” What we realized was that slow for one was different than slow for another. What was slow one month might not feel slow the next month. It all has to be balanced and measured and constantly reconfigured for each and every family and family member. The big question being, “Is this working for us?”

From those inquiries and many more we’ve come up with two workbooks for helping folks slow life down and figure out methods that work for their own families. The first one is the Slow Family Living Workbook and it’s free from our site http://www.slowfamilyliving.com . It’s full of questions, suggestions and thoughts to ponder on living your own Slow Family life.

The other is a Family Mission Statement workbook that is chock full of questions and ideas to lead families toward the creation of their own Family Mission Statement from which all else can flow. We are super, super excited and grateful too for all the families that helped us get this work out on the table.

Once upon a time I used to write complete books. Quite a lot of work, I can assure you. I remember writing a book about iterative development which took me an entire, very hot summer in the attic of my house. It seemed to last forever and even now, when I occasionally thumb through the book, I get visions of sticky, sun-drenched days that I witnessed passing by while writing, thinking, writing, thinking and writing.

Later, I started to fancy creating articles. Yes, the content was a bit more shallow. But it took me less work, typically a day or so, and it allowed me to cover more subjects in a shorter period of time. Then, several technology magazines asked me to become a columnist. I taught myself to deliver crisp messages every month in nothing more than 600 words. You end up writing very short sentences, getting rid of all details and focusing on just one key insight per column. Yet again a bit later, a business magazine invited me to write a weekly column for managers, and I constrained myself further to 400 words, apparently being the maximum amount of content a typical business executive can absorb in one read. I essentially produced sound bites with some stage-setting around it.

Then came the period of blogging. We all learned that a good blogger writes very, very short items and does not really care about style or aesthetics. A blogger does not explain or describe anything. You just link to other sites (thank God for Wikipedia, the source of all truth). And now, we have Twitter. I find myself thrown into a universe in which 140 characters – roughly 30 words – have to tell it all. Even hyperlinks are abbreviated in order to save space. On Twitter I don’t write anymore, I stick to the management summary of the introduction of a first, draft idea.

So I thought this is the right time to introduce some counter activities. If only to remind myself, I have introduced the concept of Slow Blogging. A Slow Blogger takes all the time that is needed to write an item. And the blog readers get to follow it step by step. To illustrate the principle, I have introduced three new blogs. On ‘One Blog Item A Year’ I will produce exactly one item every year. Every week, I will add one sentence to the item, resulting in an item of 52 sentences at the end of every year. Too dynamic? I also have started ‘One Blog Item A Decade’, which build up with one sentence every month, resulting in a final piece of 120 sentences every 10 years. And yes, finally I have also created ‘One Blog Item A Life’ and I will add a sentence to the one and only item on that blog every year.

Not sure how many sentences that final piece will contain, but I am not aiming for just a synopsis, rest assured.

Slow means different things to different people. That’s also what Susan Radstrom discussed in her latest blog entry “The corporate side of slow” here in SlowPlanet. I’ve been having the same kind of thoughts lately and couldn’t agree more. There is a corporate level of slow that comes to life via organisations and movements (Cittaslow, SlowFood, International Institute for Not Doing Much, etc). And there is an individual way of slow thinking that appears in the way people think, feel and act. But there is also a common denominator to the two sides (besides the word “slow”) and that, I believe, is quality. Be it great food, people we love or a job that gives us complete satisfaction.

I, myself, come from and live in Estonia - a small country on the Eastern border of Europe. This geopolitical location is actually extremely challenging - to be the link between the East and the West. This is the kind of peculiarity that does not only exist on the map but also in the minds of the people. No matter how badly we want to belong to the Western community, we will always have one foot on the other side. That is also what I believe makes the Slow movement in Estonia a bit different than it might be in the Western European countries.

For a while now, almost 20 years, Estonia has been an independent country and for five years we have enjoyed the fruits from the garden of the EU. Nothing stopped us from truly believing that we were indeed an equal partner to the rest of the Western world. Life seemed to get better each day and nothing was impossible - more workplaces were created, cities grew and streets filled with tourists.

Until…

… as a part of the global economic environment the crisis knocked on our door as well. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs (which in a country of 1.4 million is quite high), banks are filled with troubled debtors and sales numbers are decreasing in every sector you can think of. The bubble we lived in has now burst.

In the midst of all this the invasion of the Slow movement has been quite intense. The pressure to take time off and reassess our priorities is unavoidable. Having done no research and relying only on my personal observations I can say that the corporate kind of slow has not yet raised its head in Estonia. There are groups of people who practice slow life in their own way but they are not that eminent in the society as a whole. City governments are still struggling to meet the needs of their citizens, all kinds of projects have been put on hold and streets have become weirdly quiet.

Fortunately the individual approach to slow is more pervasive. For example, a recent article from a local newspaper reads:

Despite the difficult times he is optimistic and believes that nothing happens without a reason: after having spent such a long time working abroad he can now watch his children grow and has decided never to go away from home again. He would rather keep a low profile when things get better and try to have a life here, at home as a family.

This is a perfect way to describe the process of slowing down in Estonia. Of course, there families for whom losing the income isn’t just making life more complicated but rather impossible. And there are those who get even more anxious to grow their facade of a luxurious lifestyle when pressured to take time off. But, all in all, I’d like to think that a little humbleness is good for us once in a while. Difficulties make us rethink our priorities and possibilities, people stick together and depend on each other more, there is more time for details to consider and emotions to share. And since quantity is out of the question, quality steps in.

Quality - the essence of slow.