A wish for a waltz

Paramjit Bakhshi

At the beginning of this piece let me put up a warning sign.

SLOW DOWN.

No, of course there is no speed breaker here. I couldn’t have put one if I wanted to, on this shiny new paper. However it is around these two words that the article is going to revolve.

In a day and age where everything is about speed, you will wonder whether you have stumbled across some Neolithic writing. ‘Hey stop this nonsense man’ you must want to scream. You will point out that everything that is exciting in this world is fast. There is absolutely nothing as exhilarating as a fast car and nothing as delicious as fast food. We even have exciting fast men and women. Well, try spending a lifetime with all three and you will end with the bonus gifts of high blood pressure, high cholesterol and low self esteem.

There couldn’t have been many of us who while at school did not read the poem ‘Leisure’ by W.H.Davies. To refresh our memory, here are the opening lines.

We get up in the morning and the race begins. A quick bath, a hasty breakfast and off we go to school, college or to work. While out working or studying we are hurried and harried through. Hurry, hurry, hurry is what our bosses and our teachers seem to be telling us.  Other influences such as parents, children, spouse, taxi driver and the salesman keep up the litany. ‘Hurry’, they say as if life was some limited offer on which the curtains are going to come down the next day, if not the next hour.

Even if this life was going to end soon, does it help us to hurry? There is not much joy in experiencing everything as a hazy blur as we go rushing on the fast track of modern life. Yet unthinkingly we all do it because we see everyone around us perpetually rushing.

Richard Bach, author of the best selling novel ‘Jonathan Livingstone Seagull’ has the following to say about our automatic attitude.

The whole concept of speed, as a central force in our lives, owes its origin to the industrial revolution and the evolution of the market economy. In such an environment, faster machinery replaced the slow human being. Where this was not possible, the human being was pushed to work harder and faster. It came to be called productivity and became the sole measure of our worth. People living in villages ran to the factories to earn more money and society unwittingly bid adieu to the leisurely amble of the ages. We all have been running ever since.

With industry in a recession in most parts of the developed world and food prices hitting the roof, one won’t be surprised if the villager engaged in agriculture has the last laugh. It is not our efficiency but the laws of supply and demand that make us rich or poor. The Arab who tended camels a few decades ago, now flies high on the Learjet fuelled by oil discovered accidentally under his feet.

We are now discovering the error of our hurried ways. Our quick and unquestioning acceptance of the industrial model is responsible for a plethora of problems in the world today. Climate change, terrorism (fed on inequality), and unsustainable concentration of population in cities are some of the major challenges today. Technology (such as mobile phones and computers) which was designed to make our life easier is being used to ensure that we work harder and longer than ever before. We have created the myth of unlimited growth which demands a depletion of all our natural resources and threatens the existence of our planet and the human race.