Slow Sunday

Today is Slow Sunday in the UK, a day to celebrate slowness – slow food, slow pace, slow and enjoyable day. My family is cooking a slow stew with beef bones today but the fact is that we changed over to a slow food menu for Sunday a long time ago and have been sticking at it. Sunday is a Sabbath for us, not a day to get all stressed out in the kitchen and go Ramsay on everyone who slows down the process.

The Telegraph has a good article called “How To Go Slow” that I read on the train yesterday somewhere near Glasgow. I am taking a ferry home today from Aberdeen and it goes slower than anything so I think I am qualified to recommend this article. How to Go Slow also recommends other ways to slow your life down. Heres a couple of things from the article and a few I have discovered myself over the past few years to go slower:

– Baths instead of showers, and really early in the morning so I can stay longer.

– In 2005 I took off my watch and went without one for a year. I first did this as a result of advice from Robert Banks in a spirituality lecture at Fuller Seminary. Once I went almost 2 years without a watch.

– Photography with an old manual film camera. I have a medium format camera for black and while film and am building a dark room to develop my own photos. I am learning to sit and wait for nature to put on its show, to wait, as a Czech photographer once said, for the “music to play”.

– Walk everywhere and shop local. We now can go for days without using the car.

– Bake bread for our homemade pizza every Friday. It takes a couple of hours to rise. Thats slow.

– Slower but better sex. Sorry. You didn’t want to hear that.

– Travel less – not accept so many speaking invitations but be far more picky so i can stay at home more.

– Slow food and slow cooking on a sunday and more often during the week – pot roasts are great. A few days ago I cooked pork shanks in our wood stove for 4 hours.

– I have a vintage treadle printing press that does one page at a time and am about to make some books . . . very very very slowly.

Have a nice, slow Sunday.

Thought for the day – Jesus was not in a rush and refused the hectic schedule of his disciples who were hurrying things up to get the team to the Festival in time. “For you guys”, Jesus responded, “The time is always right. But my time has not yet come”. The disciples hurried on up to Jerusalem but Jesus arrived later on, in his own time, which just happened to be, as always, precisely the RIGHT time. Think slowly on that one.

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