Slow Is Beautiful

Slow down, why are you going so fast? Who are you living for? Everyone is always going so fast all the time, but if you were to stop and ask why they would not have an answer. Part of the reason they do not know why they are going so fast is that they are not living for themselves. No one lives for themselves, everyone is living for the approval of others. In Carl Honore’s book Slow Is Beautiful, he talks about slowing down and how people should live in their time. In Walker Percy’s essay The Loss of the Creature, he talks about living life for yourself and not for approval. These two authors come together and bring to light that we should slow down and live life for ourselves. Time is something that no one seems to have anymore, but that

We should not want life to be shorter and to just fly by us. Think of all the amazing and beautiful things you miss because you were too busy rushing from point A to point B. In Honore’s book he talks about how in the nineteenth century doctors were trying to bring to light all the possible side effects of speed. They mentioned many terrible things such as hair loss, tooth decay, or even cancer. Then a French man named Gabriel Hanotaux said, “We are burning our way during our stay in order to travel through more rapidly.” (Honore 46). This quote says that by moving so quickly we are just rushing our way towards the end of life. This is why we should slow down and just live life. The faster and faster we go about life the less we live and the quicker we die. If that is all we are doing then why are we still reproducing? Why are we still working? Why are we doing anything in this life if all we are doing is rushing towards death? We need to stop and slow down and live for a purpose. Everyone needs to realize that this is the only life they get and if they do not slow down and live it then in a blink of an eye it is over. If they do not then no one will have anything unique or special to say about them because everyone around them was also moving just as

In Percy’s essay he gives the example of the Grand Canyon and how no one can see it for what it is because something is always in the way. He gives many examples of how to recover the meaning of the canyon. One example he gives is a disaster happening and all the signs, buildings and guard rails are gone. You would think everything being gone would take away from the tourist’s experience but instead Percy says, “But there is the canyon, exposed at last. Exposed by what? By the decay of those facilities which were designed to help the sightseer.” (Percy 3). This quote points out when you remove all the things that are supposed to make things easier, that thing is now better. This ties back to the point of everyone moving so fast. We now have faster phones, computers, cars, and other forms of getting from here to there or getting information from here to there. Because of all that extra stuff we lose all the beauty or realness that we could have seen. You cannot experience true human interactions over a text or email. You cannot get to know what is different about someone in a two second conversation in the elevator while you both are only half listening to each other because of the phone in your hand. We all need to slow down and live life for ourselves. We need to stop rushing around all the time and just look around so we can see all