The dying art of slowness

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

By Brooke Williams

How is it that, when looking at a familiar bookcase with four shelves and hundreds of books, there is one book that stands out? And how is it that this particular book seems so apt for this particular time in my life, in our lives?

In the past 10 days, I’ve been to Chicago for a humanities festival, back to Salt Lake City for one night, to the Bay Area for five days of meetings and fundraising, and then, last night, back in my truck for a five-hour drive to Castle Valley, Utah, near Moab, to deal with issues with a home we own there. If I work fast and then drive hard, I can be back in Jackson Hole tomorrow night in time for dinner with friends.
Work fast. Drive hard.

In Utah, on my way through the office to the closet where the broken water pump is, I stop in front of the bookcase. “Slowness,” by Milan Kundera, seems to be lit up in neon. I pull the book from the shelf and open it to an underlined passage: “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” As I read this, my own breath slows along with my heart rate. I sense the desert sun through the window and note the instant that light turns to heat on the outside of my thigh. Kundera goes on:

“Where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?”

This passage stops me. I take it personally. Thinking back over my time at The Murie Center, most of it wondering about conservation and exploring new ways to think about wildness. I realize how little “ambling” and “loafing” I’ve done lately. These questions come to me: Have the amblers, loafers, and vagabonds disappeared because the grasslands and clearings have disappeared, because nature has disappeared? Or is nature disappearing because we, especially those of us who make a living protecting it, don’t amble and loaf enough?

Kundera equates speed to forgetting. For him, slowness is tied to memory. If ambling and loafing create slowness, and slowness is “directly proportional to the intensity of memory,” then how does memory contribute to minimizing the disappearance of nature?
These questions enter my body.

Kundera cites the example of a man walking down the street suddenly struck by the need to remember. He slows his pace in order to make the recollection. I think of cellular memory, of maps in the cells of monarch butterflies whose survival depends on their ability to find their way to Mexico even though they’ve never been there. Perhaps our cellular memory has the same task: keeping our species alive. Perhaps slowness is the best way to tap into it.

It is just after noon and I am three hours behind schedule. I am happy. I am in the desert I love. Castleton Tower appears as a red flame. I move my chair to stay in the warm late-autumn sun. There isn’t a whisper of breeze and I can hear only three sounds: the trill of a goldfinch foraging for the last rabbit brush seeds, the wings of a passing raven slicing the air, and a buzzing wasp.

I take a few breaths that are so new and deep that they hurt my ribs: It’s been a while, too long from this solitary space of stillness. If our work at the Murie Center focuses on innovation in conservation – on discovering new ideas about how to save this planet – slowness just may be the mechanism. This will require loafing and ambling, staring out the window, listening to the wind, following tracks in the snow.

These will be new rules for all of us who work at The Murie Ranch. I’ll write them up for the employee manual. Tomorrow. Today, I’ll sit here and imagine Olaus and Ade Murie sitting here with me.
PERMALINK:
The dying art of slowness | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

Leave a Comment