The Fikka, Hygge and Shinrin Yoku of Slowing Down: Delight of the Ordinary No. 23

Haven’t we made the easiest things the hardest?

“…It is important to stand still sometimes. Think of it as a little rest in the long journey of your life. This is your harbour. And your boat is just dropping anchor here for a little while. And after you’re well rested, you can set sail again.”

– Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

When I look up to find inspiration to write to you each week, it feels frivolously foolish to me to keep speaking to you about the ordinary simple things of life and delighting in them because in our roadrunner-stylized fast momentum world we all are looking for quick stopgap solutions like ‘how to lose weight fast’ or ‘how to remove dark circles overnight’- running full throttle speed on road and in life too!

Speed is sexy.

Slowing down is not.

And so in this crowded dross world of newsletters (mostly marketing strategy), I conjure enough courage to show up each week trying to make tiny squeaks and squeals in your inbox so we can together think about living a life with enough virtue.

Hence, when I am writing to you I am not essentially tackling topics I can solve (we all have had dark circles and they never go overnight) but I wish to sit with you over a coffee on some gentle weekend day and read my letters to you. I so warmly hope that with Delights of the Ordinary, I am taking you with me or at the very least, supporting you to find simple creative answers to the otherwise hard rigid questions of life.

Haven’t we made the easiest things the hardest?

Last week I had this plunging sense that we went through this year at a robust rattling speed, even though our humble orb Earth has been unhurriedly moving in rhythmic torque and slow slants; making days into seasons. Whereas, we in our own puny small-sized world are living a dangerously fast life – made of hunchbacks; screen gawking racoon eyes; air-con-induced super-chilly low-roof offices; expressionless dinner tables, and then ‘how to dash through the traffic’ or ‘how demanding relationships are!’

“Bottom line? Some of us habitually go fast, precisely when we should be slowing down, and vice versa.” Because, somewhere in our logical heads we have glamourized the life of ‘coffee in one hand, gadgets in another, footslog around our day and portray it as a productive day, forgetting to make pit stops.

“You waste your years by not being able to waste hours.”

– Amos Tversky

Recently I read about “Slow Productivity.” It birthed from the 1980s Slow Food Movement – a protest sparked by Carlo Petrini against the opening of McDonald’s in his city in Rome, making the slow food movement a subculture in the nearby areas. The slow food movement then caught up where speed is dominant, like work! But the different cultures of the world have been practising the sentiment of cherishing languid, non-functional turfs to breaking the binds of busyness.

Here are very few to keep your spirit high so you are inspired to sometimes take the feet off your pedal –

• FIKA – pronounced “fee-kuh,” is how Swedish people make coffee and cake most important – making time for friends and family to ‘share a cup of coffee or tea plus a little something to eat!’
• HYGGE – is spoken as “hoo-ga.” It is a Danish cultural thing of taking time away from the daily rush to be with people you care about. To go to places where you can relax and enjoy life’s quieter pleasures.
• Shinrin Yoku – Turning our face towards Japan, where Shinrin Yoku literally, means ‘forest bathing’ which is a practice of spending time near nature focusing on letting our senses bathe in the natural splendour. Interstingly, Shinrin-yoku was given by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries in 1982. Governments can take good decisions sometimes!

Do you have a word of slowing down in your culture or language?

Why Should We Slow Down?

We need to take rest or leisure or to slow down our speed because we have taken slogging to our heart – quite seriously! Rather so seriously that it is not just whipping our physical health but also beating our human spirit. And that is why we ought to talk about it and how do we slow down?

Lie in the grass or stare out of the window and let your mind wander. Pretty soon you’ll be singing the praises of living more by doing less.

Think in Waves – German philosopher, Josef Pieper once said, “Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as activity … there is leisure as “non-activity” — an inner absence of preoccupation, a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.”

Our head will tell us that ‘slowing down shouldn’t work’ but it ‘seriously works.’

When you want to make quicker progress. Simply pause and think in waves.

We ought to know that there is beauty in movement so also there is beauty in slowing down. None exist without the other. We can not run before we rest. Resting is more than a bed and a pillow waiting for us. It is beyond the spanning nature of sleeping. Dorie Clark, writer of the book, The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World says we need to recognize the moments when to shift our focus from our ultra-busy lives to adapting slow pace. She says, “The secret, then, is understanding how to think in waves and recognize when it’s time to focus on another strategy. For many…, it may be time, after years or decades of grinding hard at work, to reallocate energy toward your health, if that’s been on the backburner; or a struggling child… or outside interests.” Speed may sometimes be an aim in and of itself, but it should be an intentional goal rather than an automatic need to “keep up” with others or ourself. Hence, set boundaries on things that steal your joy, not on yourself.

Lastly, don’t multitask because multitasking is a bad way to do nearly everything.

With the hard work we usually put into our professional lives, it feels sinful to slow down since the fear of missing out wonderfully holds our perception. But someday we will be beyond our hard-working phase. We will be overworked, and tired and want to bury ourselves under the earth. For those dog-tired days connect with, as Carl Honore says it- your inner tortoise. It is the place of unloading and deliberately avoiding overloading our hands and our minds too!

So I wish you moments of slowness and leisure amidst the usual madness we all have, and as your weekly curator the programming of my faves for this week: 

To Watch – Filmed with her daughter Willow Sage Hart, Pink gets to the spirit of slowing down in this video because we agree with her that “the world’s been spinning since the beginning and everything will be all right…”

To Listen – The wizard of the internet is in this that it has brought the world closer enough, blurring the boundaries, and if in the right channels, enhancing the power of our imagination. If you listen to slow radio by BBC you will hear the world, but not see it. Simply participating from afar in the acoustic blends of sounds and music is such a restorative process of slowing down. Tap here to listen.

To Joyscroll: Form Play Studio is run by a couple and they have an incredible talent for using our everyday ordinary in visually stunning illustrations and animations. Click below or here and you’ll find some goofy yet playful cuteness of life on their Instagram page.

formplaystudio

A post shared by @formplaystudio

To End:

In the Middle by Barbara Crooker (Taken from Grateful.org)

of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s
has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don’t ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

I wish you more serenity and more swinging hammocks in warm sunny winter days. Until I write to you again.

– Anugrah