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BACK ISSUES | APRIL 2010 | CURRENT ISSUE
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BOB'S BANTER
Slow Down and Live
Robert Clements
...................................................For years on end, my time spent in the shower could have got me a mention in the Guinness World Records as the shortest time taken to bathe. I stepped into bathtub, and in the same movement switched on the shower, steadied my feet and reached for the soap. Everything else, the scrubbing and toweling were all done with the same quickness and ambidextrous movement.
One day however, while at a party, I heard an artist friend telling everybody that his ideas came while having a shower. "What about you?" he asked, "don't you get your creative thoughts from the same place?"
"I'm in and out in a jiffy," I told him proudly, "no time to waste!"
"What a waste," he said, "that's the place you need to slow down; it's full of great thoughts!" I tried it out: I slowed down the whole process, started enjoying the warm water, taking a little longer to soap myself and even spending more time just enjoying the luxury, and realized how much I'd missed in hurrying up all these years.
A woman told me of how she sought to convince her continually harried friend that she needed to find ways to relax. So she gave her a videotape on stress management and relaxation techniques, and encouraged her to watch it right away. Fifteen minutes later, her friend handed back the tape. "It was good," she said, "but I don't need it."
"But it's a 70-minute video," the woman replied. "You couldn't have watched the whole thing."
"Yes, I did," her friend assured her. "I put it on fast-forward!"
A major social problem of the 21st century is Hurry Sickness. We hurry through work. We gulp down fast food. We shop at malls. We lament that we haven't enough time. We race through the days and weeks until one day we look back in amazement and comment, "My, how the years flew by." Or until we hit a "speed bump" - like illness - that stops us cold. Then we realize the heavy toll we paid to travel the express lane.
Hurry Sickness - its symptoms include stress and anxiety, ailing relationships, lowered work performance and numerous physical maladies. Some people don't survive it. What's the cure? "For fast-acting relief try slowing down," quipped comedian Lily Tomlin. Slow down and live, for life is too short to be lived fast, and too precious not to be lived well. "I have no time to be in a hurry," said John Wesley. And he accomplished more than most of us ever will! Maybe it's time to slow down ...and live…
Start with the shower!
Robert Clements is a journalist and newspaper columnist. His daily humour column Bob’s Banter is published in over 30 newspapers and magazines in nearly every state in India, as well as in the top newspapers of Bangladesh, Dubai and Pakistan and is also translated into Hindi. He has a daily readership of an estimated 6 million readers. |
