In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow.
Interpretation
In a fast-paced world, taking the time to slow down can be a refreshing and liberating experience.
Pico Iyer's quote highlights the paradox of our modern life, where speed and constant motion are often celebrated. In contrast, he suggests that embracing a slower pace can lead to deeper appreciation, clarity, and joy, allowing individuals to step back from the rush and truly engage with their experiences and surroundings.
In practice
During a motivational speech about mindfulness and mental health.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
Through meditation one has to achieve a dreamless sleep with full alertness. Once this happens, the drop falls into the ocean and becomes the ocean.
Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information which you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you THINK or IMAGINE to be 'true.
We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself.
The song and the drumming were like this: Behold, a sacred voice is calling you; All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.
Welcome every experience the looms of fate may weave for you.
I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that "it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams."
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