March hospitality with Carl Honoré

At our hospitality morning on March 9th we all took a welcomed break from our busy schedules and learned to embrace our inner Tortoise with speaker Carl Honoré, the best-selling author and advocate of the slow movement. Carl shared with us humorous anecdotes and assured the forty women in attendance that less is more and slow is the new fast.

Carl with Patty Bell, CWC Vice-President

In a culture of instant messaging, speed yoga, and drive-through funerals, it is almost impossible to take the time to smell the roses. As a former speedaholic himself, Carl realized it was time to put on the breaks when he started trying to condense his son’s bedtime stories into one minute. Since Carl published his book “In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed”, which reveals the dangers of living life in fast-forward, the slow movement has been gaining speed. Slow cities have been cropping up around the world, as well as movements in slow food, slow sex, slow exercise, slow medicine, and even slow technology. Big companies are starting to embrace slowness to allow their workers to be more creative and efficient and last year Harvard University sent their incoming freshman class a letter with one piece of advice, to slow down.

In 2005, Carl published "Under Pressure". As well as outlining all the pressures put on parents and teachers to speed children along and grow up fast, he makes the case for slowing things down: letting children be children just a little bit longer. Carl recently wrote on his blog that Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper said that 'Under Pressure" is ...“A look at the mismanagement of the contemporary child: overprotected, overindulged, over-stimulated. An indispensable, anecdotal, comnmonsensical guide to why our kids are depressed, lazy and fat, and what we can do about it.”

We were thrilled to have Carl with us for such a stimulating and thought provoking morning. We all learned that we need to think more about why we go so fast, whether it's good-fast or bad-fast, or good-slow or bad-slow. We're hoping to put just a little bit more of that good-slow into our lives!

Submitted by Laurel Steuernagel