Taking life slowly

For the next 30 minutes, sit down and focus on this story.

Don’t turn on the television. Don’t check your e-mail. Don’t turn on the stereo. Don’t pace around the house. Don’t run to the fridge for a snack. Don’t pick up the phone.

Don’t hurry.

Take a deep breath, and keep reading.

Slow down.

Across America, people caught in the rat race complain of being overbooked, overworked and overscheduled. Busyness is an epidemic in large and small cities alike — even in Columbia, which has been recognized as a great place to live, an environmentally-friendly city and a “porch swing community.”

Despite its growth, Columbia turns out to be a good place people can reclaim time and set it at a slower pace. The methods are different, but the goal is the same: a simpler, more meaningful life and the power to take it slow.

Slow, but not slack.

After graduating from MU, Bryce Oates wanted to live his values, control his time and resist being scheduled by others. He wanted to work in sustainable agriculture. He wanted to play Frisbee golf once a week. He wanted to drink beer with his friends, to fish, to canoe and to enjoy his family. And he does just that.

“Without (all these), my life wouldn’t be as rich as it is,” says Oates, picking at a blueberry muffin and sipping a cup of coffee at the Cherry Street Artisan. “I’d rather use my canoe than fight traffic, wait in line or go to the mall.”

It’s about 10 a.m. on a Monday — what Oates calls “the lighter side of the day” with a hint of the accent that makes this state “Missourah.” The modest, soft-spoken man wears blue carpenters pants, an army green sweater and a cap of a similar color.

Oates did not grow up aspiring to be a corporate executive, but living on a farm outside Columbia with a wife and child didn’t seem to be in the stars either. There was no plan.

Coming of age in tiny Adrian, Oates’ family and friends told him to leave, find a good job and make money because farming for a living had not been easy on his parents. So, at the end of high school, he set off for Columbia. Much to his surprise, he found himself longing for open spaces.

“I wouldn’t even be able to see the stars here,” he recalls about his first college months. “There’s just this orange glow in the sky.”

He knew then that his future lay in the country. He became involved in campus activities that promoted sustainability and learned about new ways to make small-town living and farming work.

“Once I started to learn, I started to connect the dots,” Oates says. “I started to think about how I can live a life that means a positive future for the environment, for me and for my family.”

After college, Oates, 27, worked full time for the Missouri Rural Crisis Center, where he helped mid-Missouri farmers survive a market dominated by corporate agribusiness. Currently, he works on his farm off Route M but continues to look for opportunities to serve the local farming community. The rest of each day he devotes to his wife, his 9-month-old son and himself.

In many ways, Oates illustrates the cultural movement known as voluntary simplicity. People who choose the lifestyle do it because the dominant culture looks bleak: materialistic, competitive and damaging to the environment and the human spirit. They decide to work less, spend less and protect the environment. In return, they say they get more family time, less debt, less clutter, more community involvement, more healthy and a more meaningful life. They buy local goods, avoid the mall, recycle, cook meals from scratch, walk and support others trying to live a similar life.

Oates says he is not part of the movement, per se, but he identifies with many of its values. Right out of college, he started to look at time and money as a trade-off, as many in the movement do. That awareness allowed him to take control of both and eventually live his dream: owning a small farm in the country where he can grow his own food and, at night, sit on the porch and breathe fresh air while watching the light of fireflies mingle with the stars.

It sounds like a pastoral dream, but Oates consciously made it reality.

The lifestyle is not possible for everyone. But it’s not the only way to escape the fast-paced life, just as voluntary simplicity is not the only solution to controlling time.

The changing time

The contemporary obsession with lack of time has started a culture-wide discourse about making a change, slowing down or simplifying — words sometimes used interchangeably. In 2000, an average American put in 1,880 hours on the job, 200 more than 20 years before. Meanwhile, studies show eight in 10 Americans say society’s priorities are “out of whack,” and 90 percent of respondents to a recent poll said working too much means less quality time with their families.

What little time people have left is spent watching television, the No. 1 American leisure activity, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Time-Use Survey.

Something is amiss, and it’s not just about blue collar or white collar workers. It doesn’t matter if you live in a red state or blue state.

On July 2, Republican pollster and strategist Frank Luntz was on PBS’ “Now with Bill Moyers” to talk about the elusive 2004 swing voter, a woman struggling to balance work and family. Her main concern was not health care, gay marriage or the war in Iraq.

“(It’s) the lack of free time,” Luntz said. “The No. 1 thing that matters to them is that they don’t have the time that they want for their job, for their kids, for their spouse, for themselves, for their friends. The issue of time matters to them more than anything else in life.”

Time was not always this pivotal.

In the early ages, time was measured for survival — people needed to know when to plant and harvest. As time was divided into hours, then minutes and later seconds, humans became more controlled by it. In the Middle Ages, people used Natural Time to measure the day. They did things when it felt right: They ate when hungry, slept when tired, worked when something needed doing.

Clock time took over with the Industrial Revolution. Carl Honoré, author of “In Praise of Slowness,” says that the human relationship to time is about power — the more accurately people are monitored, the more efficient production becomes.

The clock is considered the most important machine of the Industrial Revolution, “the operating system of modern capitalism, the thing that makes everything else possible — meetings, deadlines, contracts, manufacturing processes, schedules, transport, working shifts,” Honoré writes.

The world was on the fast track. New machines were developed at astounding speed, and it seemed the future would have us sipping cool drinks in the sun while the family robot picked ripe apples from the orchard. We worked for time off because the more the machine could do, the more leisure we could have.

In the first decades of the 20th century, this dream seemed within reach: Economists said the industrialized world had reached a point where it could produce all needed goods in just two work days each week. But what would people do with all the free time?

Europeans have consistently fought to reduce working hours, and some Americans followed suit. In December 1930, Kellogg, the cereal maker, pioneered the 30-hour work week in response to the age of leisure. It is considered one of America’s few successful experiments to this day.

But then something called consumerism came along, write Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez in their 1992 best-seller, Your Money or Your Life. Once the machines were able to fill basic needs of food and shelter, industries started worrying about profit. If leisure grew, people would work less and consume less and the industrialists would lose wealth. People needed to continue to work, they thought.

So the machines started to produce things no one really needed at the time, while advertising lent a hand to create a sense of needs unfulfilled. If people were to buy the new things, they would need more money. And to get it, well, they had to keep working hard. Problem solved.

Robin and Dominguez both gave up high-paying jobs to live on their savings away from the fast-paced world. As writers, they wanted to provide a “new road map” for people’s relation to money. In their view, the old map, which had been around since the Industrial Revolution, encouraged people to acquire more. That made sense in an era of expansion and growth, but not anymore.

“The bottom line is that we think we work to pay the bills – but we spend more than we make on more than we need, which sends us back to work to get the money to spend to get more stuff,” they write.

It’s not just about managing personal finances; it’s about knowing when you have enough. It’s about protecting your health, family and the environment by rejecting the idea that “more is better.”

The development of technology and the desire to consume more than the previous generations increased the hours devoted to shopping and watching TV. In an essay published in the book Take Back Your Time, Jonathan Rowe describes the vicious cycle of American consumerism: the more you acquire, the more pressed for time you feel. You buy because you think more is better. Thus, you work more to buy more and forget that exploring the mall is time, and time, as Benjamin Franklin said, is money.

At the end of the day, you are, as Robert Putnam of Harvard University said in the mid-90s, bowling alone and feeling unhappy.

The struggle for balance

A few years ago, Peggy McGuinness was routinely putting in 60 to 70 hours a week at a law firm in New York. Representing Wall Street clients might have been the cherry on the corporate litigation sundae, but it came at a cost. It was the epitome of the fast-paced lifestyle, McGuinness remembers. Everything was sacrificed for the firm.

If she wanted to go to the symphony, she dashed over from work, hoping to make it in time. Her daily routine included reading the paper on the 45-minute subway commute, time she also used to respond to e-mail on her BlackBerry device. The stove in her apartment went unused for weeks at a time because she ate most meals at the firm’s cafeteria. Once, she worked a 40-day stretch without a day off.

When she quit her job to come to MU and teach law, she turned in the BlackBerry. She says her life is more balanced now: she feels healthier, works out frequently, chats longer with her neighbors, buys local produce more often and regularly uses her stove.

“Now, I control my schedule,” she says. “In New York, my clients used to do that. It’s the ultimate freedom. There is no such thing as an academic emergency.”

Although she had a feeling life in academia would be easier to control, McGuinness wasn’t consciously making the choice of a slower life. But now that she holds the reins, she is not about to let go. The New Yorker in her even warmed up to the politeness of some local cashiers.

“It seemed cashiers were slow and wanted to chit-chat,” she says. “At first, the interaction annoyed me. Now, I expect it.”

Becoming a professor is not the standard answer for people looking for control, but the choice has its advantages. For David Schenker, MU associate professor of classical studies, the up side includes walking or biking to work and spending the summer on Halfway Island, a strip of land on a river in upstate New York, close to the Canadian border. Schenker is a jovial man in his 40s whose office in the heart of campus next to Brady Commons overflows with books. He gets a kick-start from his morning trek to work from his home near the public library.

It’s simpler, he says. No traffic jams, no irritation, and he still gets to the office faster than his neighbor who drives. Lucy, his mutt, sometimes accompanies him to work, where she paces around the office demanding attention.

“Everyone is happy to see the dog,” he says, petting Lucy with his left hand. He pauses to glance down at her, then smiles and adds: “(Walking or biking) is a wonderful way to start and end the work day.”

The walk home snaps Schenker out of work mode. By the time he gets there, he is recharged and ready to pay attention to the family. But boosting their batteries back to full power requires more drastic measures. Schenker, his wife, two children and two dogs vacation on Halfway Island, which has been in his wife’s family since the 1890s. With no electricity, no neighbors and no pressures, the island is an oasis of calm in the desert of turbulent modernity. For a few weeks each year the family goes there to talk, read and swim.

“Everything stops,” Schenker says. “We make everything stop.”

Still, technology has encroached somewhat in recent years. They now take their laptops along to check for work-related messages. They also have a cell phone in case of emergency, but they keep it turned off. Although e-mail and cell phones make unplugging harder, Schenker is not willing to forego isolation.

“We are not going to be ruled by these things,” he says.

The break does wonders for rest and also for work. The Schenkers have brought into their Columbia life the minimal TV watching they learned from their summer lifestyle. They also try to have meals together, even though they aren’t as quiet and relaxing as the hours-long sunset dinners on the deck overlooking the river.

Schenker illustrates an important point – being slow is not about being lazy or doing nothing. It’s about balance, finding the “tempo giusto,” the right pace.

“Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality,” Honoré writes. “Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections – with people, culture, work, food, everything.”

Slow food

As the Schenkers prepare for dinner, Bernadette Dryden ponders her dinner choices in a house tucked at the margins of the woods behind Boone Hospital, a 20-minute bicycle ride away. It could be Italian — her favorite cuisine — or it could be one of those vegetarian nights.

It doesn’t really matter what it is when you love cooking and food as much as Dryden does. And love is an understatement. Her kitchen walls display framed photographs representing various moments of her life and the way food played an important role in them. There are the dinners on her trip to Italy when she was 20, the desserts she cooked for a Missouri Honor Medalist and New York Times food critic, and the ex-boyfriend picking raspberries. Cooking is a way she gives her life balance. It not only fulfills her passion for food, but also brings her closer to her friends.

“If you know how to cook, you’ll always have friends,” she says, quoting food guru James Beard. Dryden has worked for the Missouri Department of Conservation for almost two decades as publications director and led the local chapter of the Slow Food movement for about a year and a half.

Born in Italy almost 20 years ago, the Slow Food movement has a simple message: Take time to enjoy food. Today, more than 83,000 people — about 50 of them in Columbia — in over 100 countries adhere to its principles of buying local produce, cooking recipes from scratch and sharing the historical and cultural traditions of food. The movement is about more than just sitting at the table for hours; it champions sustainable agriculture, supporting farmers and protecting the environment.

The culinarily abled are far from being its sole supporters. The movement’s philosophy says Slow Food is first and foremost for people who wish to listen to the rhythm of their own lives and possibly adjust it. There is hardly a better way into slowness than through food, Slow Foodies say.

Dryden couldn’t agree more. Cooking is a creative outlet. It relaxes her. She puts on music, forgets about a stressful day and reminisces about other times she cooked a particular dish. She loves working with the beauty of the food, smelling the blended aromas, tasting and feeling the textures of the food. “Food is the world’s greatest gift, and it’s so underappreciated,” she says.

To illustrate the point, she likes to tell a story about her first visit to Rome. She was sitting in a little restaurant and three businessmen in suits walked in, snaked around the tables and headed right into the kitchen. She could see them tasting the food being prepared by the cook, taking a genuine interest in what they were about to eat.

No one here would do that, she says. “We lost our connection to what we eat. We have to appreciate what we have before it’s lost to the Wal-Marts of the world.”

Slow Food is not just a dinner club as many think, but also a movement that tries to get people to cook more and spend quality time at the table. Dryden’s group, called the Katy Trail Convivium, also offers Mid-Missouri farmers an opportunity to network and sell their produce and promotes buying organic food at local stores such as the Columbia Farmer’s Market, Boone County Farmer’s Market, Clover’s Market or the Root Cellar. Buying and cooking local food, Dryden says, allows people to connect to the land, preserve traditions and retain control of food sources.

To her, the argument of having no time to cook and eat is absurd. She refutes it with a quote from Italian chef Marcella Hazan: Saying you have no time to cook is like saying you have no time to shower.

Walking (or cycling) the distance

Sam the mutt breaks the Friday morning silence with a bark. The sun creeps through the windows of Ian Thomas’ house on the MKT trail and he smiles, leaning back in a reclining arm chair, a cup of steaming hot coffee in hand. It’s a work day and Thomas is barefoot, wearing dark navy jeans and a denim shirt with a small fluorescent green bicycle pinned on the left pocket. He’s already at work. By 10 a.m. he has already fielded three phone calls about the design for the Walking School Bus T-shirts his organization is printing.

Thomas, a 43-year-old Briton who has lived in Columbia for more than five years, administers a local grant for a national project called Active Living by Design, which strives to improve health and health care across America. Thomas is responsible for activities like organizing groups of children to walk to school and encouraging them to stay fit. The Walking School Bus will begin April 18, and it will bring groups of families together, with adults taking turns walking to school with the children.

Thomas always had an interest in pedestrian life. As a kid, he rode his bike around the neighborhood. During college, the bicycle became his vehicle of choice. It remains so to this day, although in the U.S., Thomas realized cars are often given priority over people.

That’s why he and a group of local cycling enthusiasts started PedNet, an organization whose mission is to promote bicycling and walking along with public policy that enables the safe pursuit of these activities. The group successfully parlayed local support into policy. Their idea of a pedestrian-friendly Columbia has been incorporated into the city’s long-term growth plan, and their calls for narrower streets and wider sidewalks have become street building norms.

The health benefits are obvious, but Thomas’ dedication goes beyond a commitment to fitness.

“I feel better,” he says. “I feel that I am more productive by taking longer to get where I’m going.”

His desire for a productive and meaningful life brought him the current job, which sometimes allows him to work from home and be with his children, Jack, 8, and Emily, 10. They’re enthusiastic participants in another program their Dad oversees, the “Passport to Fitness” program. Sixteen schools and 1,700 children are involved. The children get a “passport” in which they keep tabs of their daily exercise, trying to reach the target of more than 1,000 minutes a month. Jack and Emily proudly display their fitness passport notebooks showing they’ve met the required quota of exercise for the past two months.

The slow-paced activities have social value, Thomas says. His own policy is to nod or say “hi” to everyone he passes on the MKT trail. It’s harder to do that in a car, which acts as a protective shield. Even Thomas admits he feels less friendly on the road, which is one of the reasons the family cut down to one car.

Owning stuff comes at a price and it’s too much of a hassle, Thomas says. “Just having things makes you more stressed because you have to keep it working and you need to store it.”

The Thomas’ vacation habits embody their life choices. Every Memorial Day weekend, the four of them hop on their bikes and ride the Katy Trail for three to four days. Over the past few years, they’ve cycled all of the trail’s 225 miles. They spend the nights at local inns in the towns they cross, observe nature and take notes on the flora and fauna of the region. These are such idyllic vacations, Thomas says. “We’d much rather do that than fly.” Even the year they went to Disney World in Florida, they took the train rather than fly the distance.

A recipe for everyone

Whether they want to slow down or simplify, the people in this story share the belief that Columbia suits their lifestyle. Thomas doesn’t think PedNet would have worked as well in other places, while Oates says the city is simplicity-friendly. Even McGuinness, a city girl, likes it despite the lack of things to do for single professionals.

Going slow may not be an acceptable idea for many people in the competitive American free-market system, says Columbia Mayor Darwin Hindman. But he says it’s good to preserve one’s choices and work towards a quality life, which is harder to achieve if you’re competitive all the time. Hindman says he is proud of Columbia. After all, it would be easy to forget about building parks, trails and sidewalks and just package people into one development after another.

“(Improving the quality of life) is never ending, but Columbia is far ahead of most places,” Hindman says. He smiles playfully and adds: “And that’s a competitive advantage.”

Columbia’s low unemployment rate could mean greater job flexibility for people looking to cut down on work hours. If you want to live at a slower pace, the city offers more than 25 miles of trails within city limits, more than 2,000 acres of parks, a dozen or so health clubs and two farmer’s markets.

The city also boasts about encouraging community interaction through volunteer services, festivals such as the 15-year-old Twilight Festival, the Heritage Festival, the Festival of the Arts or the younger True/False film festival, a live-music scene and a downtown full of restaurants, cafes and stores. Show Me Dharma is one of many meditation and mindfulness initiatives in the region, while the Ragtag Cinemacafé allows movie buffs to eat and drink on an assortment of secondhand chairs and couches while enjoying the film.

In March, the city passed an ordinance to allow the sale of liquor on sidewalks, a decision that will let restaurants create a more European-style dining experience.

Making life choices that go against the mainstream workhorse image might not be easy for everybody. Research shows that people who decide to simplify and slow down do it because they can afford it. They have seen the promise of what John De Graaf called “affluenza,” the modern obsession with goods, and been turned off by it.

We live in a culture that is increasingly post-materialistic, says Brett Johnson, a sociologist at Luther College in Iowa who has studied the voluntary simplicity movement. Those living simply grew up in a period of economic boom and started to look for a life without material possessions. As a result, they cut down on working hours because they decided stuff wouldn’t make them happier.

“Voluntarily cutting work hours is oftentimes something that is available to a professional, not to an assembly line worker,” Johnson says.

This counter-culture wrestles with the appearance of elitism. But, Johnson says, there is hope for the average worker. When asked to work overtime, many choose to do so for the money. But if people opt for fewer possessions, they don’t feel as much pressure to work overtime to pay the bills, Johnson says. If people cut their expenses, they have more freedom to say “no.”

That’s easier said than done and it is the reason leaders in the simplicity movement, such as the Center for a New American Dream and the Take Back your Time organization, campaign for public policy to reduce the work week, increase wages and realize the dream of a society where everyone can live a simpler and slower life.

“It is true that some manifestations of the slow philosophy – alternative medicine, pedestrianized neighborhoods, free-range beef – do not fit every budget,” Honoré writes. “But most do. Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of the television.”

It’s true the latter are cheap, but they still have a price: hours, minutes and seconds. How much of that are we willing to spend on ourselves?