It’s great to be here!  I am in the process of launching both an idependent bookstore tour for my new novel, titled The Farmer, as well as what I’m calling the Slow Book Movement.  The goal is to create a resurgence in the lost art of literature, and to one day grow as large and widespread as the Slow Food Movement.  I want to involve writers, readers, publishers, and anyone else with a love and interest in good books.  This is my opening post of what will be an ongoing blog describing the adventure of a self-published book tour and starting up a brand new movement!  To begin, check out my portal for fund-raising on Kickstarter.com.  Search for “The Farmer Book Tour”.  This website is great, and may help other slow people get their own projects going!  Thanks for reading and keep checking for updates.  Right now my novel is at the printing press, so the big release date is coming up soon!!

It is not really my habit to link to videos on YouTube. But this tirade of stand-up comedian Louis C.K. at Conan o’Briens tonight show neatly touches on an important aspect of the case for Slow Technology and Slow IT. It may not be in ZEN style, but Louis clearly encourages us to practice more mindfulness in the face of advanced technology.

We are so spoiled by the speed and availability of technology that we genuinely feel depressed or even mistreated if we temporarily have to do without. And also, we don’t even realise anymore how advanced technology actually is and what miracles are done with it.

It takes your mobile, ultra light-weight phone more than 3 seconds to connect? Well, its reaching out to the other side of the planet. Wirelessly.

Will your plane arrive 20 minutes late? For heaven’s sake: you’re sitting in a chair. In the sky!

Last September my fiance and I packed up our hectic London lives and jumped on our tandem bicycle to circumnavigate the Northern Hemisphere without flying. I’m afraid our reasons for not flying are entirely indulgent. We don’t think that airplanes are the devil and aren’t trying to save the world. Nor are we hardened explorers out to make our mark. We simply thought that traveling without jumping on and off planes, in and out of sterile airports, would be a bit more interesting. That inkling has proved to be a massive understatement. 11 months in and I am a huge convert to the slow travel movement. Our average speed around the world is 3mph. The world is bigger, more intriguing, more welcoming and more awesome the slower you travel through it. And that isn’t just for those looking for an epic adventure. There’s a slow means to take the world in on everyones doorsteps. I hope that some of our tales help inspire people to do so.

So far we have cycled from London to The Pyranees, walked across Northern Spain, sailed across The Atlantic, hitch hiked on boats down the Caribbean, bused across Venezuela and Colombia, sailed to Panama, bused to Mexico and cycled from Mexico to Canada. We now find ourselves in Japan, having just spent 11 days on board a 65 000 tonnes container ship across The Pacific. We’ve now got 9 months to travel overland around Asia before picking up our tandem on the edge of The Black Sea and cycling back into London.

Our trip is essentially lots of mini adventures stuck together. We have tried to make our means of travel as enlightening as the experience of actually traveling through somewhere. In most cases we have found that the means of traveling can actually be more important than where you are: It completely changes your perspective as well as how strangers perceive you.

When you are an unexpected visitor or don’t comply with the norm you immediately open yourself up to your surroundings. Rather than being intimated by you, locals are intrigued and want to be part of the adventure. The world is on your side. On our fully loaded tandem, even the most inhospitable dusty backwaters of middle America became havens of smiling, bemused and welcoming faces. When we arrived in a Moroccan fishing port on a 1930s sailing boat we were quickly befriended. The locals wanted to know why 5 Westerners we were on a dilapidated old boat in a fishing port. Consequently they gave us tours of the town, took us to the local watering holes and gave us a huge insight into their culture. Similarly when hitch hiking on banana boats in the Caribbean we saw a long way beyond the sandy beaches of the tourist resorts. The locals weren’t used to seeing white folk in their parts of town and so welcomed us in, escorted us around and cooked us BBQ chicken feasts.

Traveling slowly has allowed us to see the best of the world and its people. It forces you to embrace the ‘nowheres’ of the world, leaving the tick list of the well trodden path to faster moving folk. The more time you have and the less things you must see the more open you are to unknown experiences and people. I hope you enjoy reading about some of them on the next leg of our trip!

The most influential book I read when I first set out to examine the topic of time was Jeremy Rifkin’s Time Wars. In this book, first published in 1989, Rifkin drew a parallel between the way we treat the environment (as a resource to be manipulated and dominated) and the way we treat time (as a resource to be manipulated and dominated). He championed the folks he calls time heretics, and counted in that group all sorts of people who challenge existing notions of time, including holistic health practitioners, organic farmers, home schoolers, slow foodies, simple living advocates, etc. He described these folks as seeking a “more empathetic union with the rhythm of nature.”

I pondered for a long time about how I could be more empathically connected with the rhythms of nature. At the same time, I was studying the history of different time intervals, for instance, weeks, years, months, days, hours. I realized that I could easily sort these time intervals into natural and artificial by asking the question: Can you see, hear, taste, touch or smell this unit of time? Natural time can be observed. Artificial time intervals can only be identified using invented tools of measurement like clocks or calendars.

For instance, there’s no way to tell whether it’s Tuesday or Wednesday by looking around you. You also can’t tell if it’s the 14^th or the 15^th. Or if it’s 2 PM or 3 PM. Hold onto this date: March 11, 2009. 3:51 PM. Does it mean anything?

But you can tell when you are hungry. You can recognize the difference between a high tide and a low tide. You can tell if it’s spring or autumn (except perhaps if you live at the equator). If you can see the moon, you know when it’s full or waxing or waning. And you can tell if it’s night or day, except perhaps during dawn and dusk.

That’s one of the interesting things about the difference between natural time and artificial time. Natural time glides from one phase to another gradually rather than having an abrupt edge, like the bell that rings at the end of a classroom hour. And natural time is cyclic. It circles through distinctly different phases, from bright to dark, from winter to summer, from high to low, and it always returns.

Artificial time is measured as if each unit was exactly the same. Each day occupies the same space on the calendar. Each hour on a weekly planner is allotted one line. This perpetuates the notion that time is a resource we can actually calculate and manage. I don’t know about you but I worked in various office jobs for years. I was supposed to work 8 hours a day. Some days I worked 10 hours in 8 hours. Other days maybe two hours. We’ve all experienced minutes that seem to stretch out for an hour and hours that flash by in a minute. Natural time has rhythm and flow but it’s not exact. The daffodils bloomed on March 1 this year but April 27 last year and March 3 the year before that.

We can’t do without artificial time. Almost every artificial time interval, from the minute to the hour, from the week to the month, was designed to help human beings get together. We couldn’t arrange a dinner or a coffee date with friends, travel on trains or airplanes, or show up on time for a performance or a meeting, if we didn’t have these tools.

But I’m also convinced that many of the problems that plague us have to do with our unswerving belief in the reality of artificial time. I am proud to call myself a time heretic and advocate for spending as much time as possible in natural time. Meanwhile, here’s a photo I took in a sunny woods on March 11, 2009 at 3:51 PM. I wanted to contrast this with a picture of a calendar showing that date circled and a clock with its hands pointing to 3:51 PM but couldn’t figure out how to insert them in this post.

Photo Erica Berman.

Text Sarah Raymond

The nice thing about Paris is that it’s small for such a major city; a lot of things you might want to see and do are within walking distance of each other. It’s easy to slow down and walk from one destination to the next: the Louvre is not far from the Marais, from which you can stroll over to the Ile St-Louis & Ile de la Cité, which in turn are just next to St-Germain, and then perhaps you might want to keep going just a bit further - possibly to the Musée d’Orsay, followed by the Eiffel Tower? All of a sudden, though the distance between one place and the next is relatively short, you’ve walked many kilometers. Of course, it’s always nice to slow down even further for a break at a café… but when it’s time to move on, your feet may start to object. There is always the métro - but on a nice day, you may not want to go underground and miss all that the city has to offer.

This is where Vélib’ comes to the rescue. (more…)