Iyer maintains that “ contemplating internal landscapes can be just as rich an experience as traveling through external ones.” A travel writer, Iyer advocates an occasional trip to “nowhere”-any place of quiet retreat-where solitude can allow us to unwind, catch up with our lives, regain perspective, nourish creativity, and search for solutions to our problems from within. It’s only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture.” (p. “It’s easy to feel as if we’re standing two inches away from a huge canvas that’s noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. Anyone reading his 96-page book, he proclaims, will absorb more information than Shakespeare did during his entire lifetime. In The Art of Stillness, Iyer confirms the obvious: that information is bombarding us at a much faster pace than we can possibly process it. And remember, “Evolution works on the principle of survival of the fittest, not the fastest” (p. Wait for ideas to incubate below the radar, rather than striving to brainstorm them to the surface. But the initial step is to simply relax-“put aside impatience, stop struggling and learn to accept uncertainty and inaction. “There is no one-size-fits-all formula for slowing down,” Honore writes, “no universal guide to the right speed.” (p. In other words, learn to live at the right speed. It’s about finding a balance in our everyday choices: “Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for” (p. The Slow movement, he explains, isn’t about “doing everything at a snail’s pace.” It’s about learning to live better in our fast-paced world. “In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.”įor those of us who do not want to become “rushaholics,” Carl Honore extends an invitation to decelerate and join the Slow movement. This roadrunner culture is taking a toll on everything from our health, diet and work to our communities, relationships and the environment.” He writes: “Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock,” writes Honore, “a dash to a finish line that we never seem to reach. While acknowledging that acceleration has changed our world in many positive ways-“Who wants to live without the Internet or jet travel?” Honore asks-our love of speed has become “an addiction, an idolatry” that constantly propels us forward at a faster and faster pace. I then explain the importance of and offer a few suggestions for unhurried writing. In this column I discuss books by two authors-Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slow (HarperCollins, 2004) and Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (TED Books, 2014)-who write in praise of slowing down and looking inward. In our hurried and often harried world, thank goodness there are writers reminding us that faster is not always better.