# Living Slower Is Possible > I believe that living fast is not living, it is surviving. Our culture instils in us the fear of wasting time, but the paradox is that acceleration... - **Author:** mireia-navarro-vera · **Category:** Adultos - **Published:** 2015-03-15 · **Updated:** 2016-02-15 - **URL:** https://elteuespai.com/en/living-slower-is-possible/ - _Translation pending clinical review._ --- “**I believe that living fast is not living, it is surviving**. Our culture instils in us the fear of wasting time, but the paradox is that acceleration makes us squander life” “We must seriously consider what we devote our time to. No one on their deathbed thinks: “I wish I had spent more time at the office or watching TV”, and yet these are the things that consume the most time in people's lives” *Carl Honoré* ## The culture of haste When you read sentences like these, you seriously start to wonder what you devote your time to and how you do it. The day has 24 hours, not a minute more nor a minute less, but the things we have to do often, without a doubt, exceed that time. We live fast, we live without time to manage our time. Most of the time, we do not stop to plan, to prioritise and to determine what we want to spend our valuable time on; we simply let ourselves be carried along by events, without thinking. This pace of life does not let us enjoy ourselves, we run through** life without stopping to breathe**. While we are doing one thing, we are thinking about the ones we are going to do afterwards; we do not even devote time to the task we are doing at that moment. Our mind races, it flies from one place to another** thus increasing our sense of stress**. ### The pace we pass on to our children We always race along in the left lane without even looking at the road, and in that race we take our children along with us. Filling their days with extracurricular activities and dashes from home to school, from school to whatever activity is next, and from here rushing home to have dinner and go to bed. When the day ends, if you look at the seconds you have devoted to enjoying your children, they tend to be zero, because we were in too much of a hurry to arrive on time everywhere. Where does this lead us? ### When even leisure goes fast ![slow movement is possible](/images/blog/2015/03/slow-es-posible1.webp)We have reached such a point that we even accelerate our leisure, we fill our weekend schedules with thousands of activities and we arrive at Sunday exhausted. But if we analyse it thoroughly, how many seconds of this time have truly made us enjoy ourselves? They tend to be few and they tend to be the slow ones, the ones we have done without haste, concentrating on that moment, without thinking about anything else. These are moments that I call the here and now, in which your mind is 100% focused on what it is doing. ## Prioritising what truly matters More and more, when I think of a pleasant moment, I see it in slow motion, I see a calm breakfast with my children, with the table full of toast, jam, juice and coffee. The smell, the taste, without getting up from the chair a thousand times, without TV and above all without haste. That is what I want. It is not about living slowly all the time, every day of the week, in every area of my life, but it is about prioritising, about devoting time to what is truly important, about not having the feeling of running all day and being able to do things always one at a time, giving them the attention they deserve. I want time to observe how my children grow, time to bake a cake with them, time to read, to work and to put on a load of laundry without feeling that constant sensation of having to run for everything and never arriving on time for anything. ## The SLOW movement ![slow movement is possible](/images/blog/2015/03/movimiento-slow.webp)In the nineties, the SLOW movement appeared, which in essence is simply about slowing down and finding the right amount of time for each thing. [Carl Honoré](http://www.carlhonore.com) denounces** the culture of haste** and its consequences, the lack of patience, the hyperstimulation, the superficiality, the multitasking, and defends slowness, savouring the moments and above all,** prioritising in life**. ## An exercise for you I propose a simple exercise: remember a pleasant moment of your life, it can be from childhood or youth. Try to relive it for one minute and now answer these questions: Was it a slow or a fast moment? Did you see yourself running from one place to another? Were you watching TV or were you with someone important in your life? What were you devoting your time to? If the moments we remember from our life are slow, are shared and are pleasant, why do we insist on running from one place to another? If we want to fill ourselves with these moments, we must start to prioritise and decide what we spend our time on and how, and above all at what pace.