Cool Down (32 page)

Another benefit that the blue flag dinner offers to all participants, regardless of age, is that of legitimizing the act of “doing nothing” for a short while. This reinforces the value and power of silence, or at least, stillness. You
are
doing something, of course, you're eating and talking and listening. But for this hour, you are not playing soccer, working on the computer, or talking on the phone. You are just being—together.

This, I believe, goes a long way towards teaching kids and adults alike that it's all right to stop for a while, that event-to-event living comes at a great cost, and that pausing occasionally yields its own dividends. While there's good intention in sending your kids to one extracurricular activity after another, there is also the danger of conditioning them by way of this experience that to race from event-to-event is the sole approach to working life. For some parents at least, the desire to see kids involved and active, combined with their own momentum and event-to-event thinking might have swung the pendulum a little too far to one side—to the point at which there is so much going on that time for decompression is completely lost.

Some parents, of course, might see nothing wrong with this, since activity keeps kids healthy and active. Similarly, adults without kids, who find themselves too busy for blue-flag dinners with partners and friends, might satisfy themselves that a busy life equals a fulfilled life. But once again, this reveals an addiction to immediacies that robs all of us of deeper, more profound understanding. Take, for example, the concept of accountability.

Event-to-event blindness, as I have demonstrated, leads to a kind of intellectual isolation. When people are given no time to pause, reflect, and process the stresses of the day, their sense of isolation deepens. For example, when we observe a person exhibiting road rage or merely driving aggressively, we observe that person demonstrate anger over having his route interrupted, his dignity supposedly mocked. An eruption occurs within the isolation of his event-to-event existence. Isolation, as the Dalai Lama points out in
The Art of Happiness
, magnifies suffering,
¹
and a magnification of suffering quickly leads to overreaction. But it is quicker and easier, it seems, to accept this isolation as a fact of life and just keep moving. This is what Boxer the horse did in
Animal Farm
, described in our very first chapter.

Acceptance of bad habits leads to their legitimization. Observe, for example, how road rage has now been redefined clinically, as a condition called Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED). Does everyone who claims to have IED actually have it, or are they just having a bad day or a bad week or a bad drive home? This legitimization of IED has been met with skepticism from some mental health professionals and social psychologists alike. The problem, they say, is that accepting road rage as a clinical condition tends to take the accountability for such behavior away from the individual and place it somewhere in the misty realms of society at large.

But why am I discussing road rage here, in a section about dining together as a family? Because the clinical legitimization of IED symbolizes a growing trend in the erosion of personal accountability, a trend that can be countered through simple,
slow
rituals such as pausing for dinner.

Let's see if there are other connections that can be made to support this idea:

High-speed pressure tends to squeeze out of people the willingness and ability to account for their own actions and to be responsible for both the good and the bad in life. Is it any surprise, then, that accountability for road rage has now conveniently been shifted away from the individual himself? Or that coffee shops and fast food restaurants can be successfully sued for serving hot beverages? The loss of personal accountability threatens to rob society of innovators, leaders, and motivated individuals, and to rob individuals themselves of the gifts of self-determination and of questioning the world around them. We can prevent a great deal of this evasion of responsibility simply by ensuring time is spent with people we care about. This solution applies equally well to large families as it does to singles, and everyone in between. Make sure to make time to talk with people who can hear you, while you simultaneously hear yourself. Let the pressures of life find a slower, safer escape route.

Consider also the dilemma many overworked parents face in having to be the “bad guy” when discipline is required. When you come home from work late and there's only half an hour between the time you pull into the driveway and the time the kids go to bed, who wants to spend that time being stern? Well-intentioned parents know that discipline and guidance is necessary, of course, but that doesn't make it any easier. When there's little time to transition from the pressures of the workplace and those of home, the quality of the parent-child relationship suffers.

Discipline, like accountability, is like medicine inside a bitter pill—hard to take but essential to well-being. Children who do not grow up with the discipline of regular homework, supper, and bedtime hours, and then miss out on the rules and corrections that parents are duty-bound to give, will emerge unwittingly with a gaping hole where personal accountability should be. This is already evident in the spate of lawsuits recently launched against teachers and schools who fail a student or who giveaBwhen an A was desired. Is a low mark the fault of the student or the school? A loss of personal accountability guarantees that blame will be placed in someone else's hands.

Though the above examples focus largely on the relationship between kids and their parents, the same principles apply to other types of relationships, too. Observe the following case study:

In the summer of 2006, an elderly man exited from a health club where he had been enjoying his daily seniors' exercise workout. As he did so, a cyclist who was traveling on the sidewalk, crashed into him. The senior was knocked to the ground and suffered injuries to his head and face. Instead of apologizing or offering to help, the cyclist berated the old man, accusing him of getting in his way, and criticizing him for walking so slowly. The cyclist then took off, and it was left to a couple of good Samaritans to help the man to a hospital, where he was admitted for observation. This is certainly not an isolated case, but it highlights the type of thing that easily happens when immediate reactionism rules.

Another reason for the need to
cool down
within the family portion of the 24-hour day has to do simply with overload. Children of all ages have schedules and distractions as much as any adult.

Kids have already learned the addictive ways of the high-speed life and they don't want to (or can't) give it up. Sixty percent of children over eight years old in the UK carry cell phones, as do 90 percent of kids over age 12. There's even a special ringtone used by kids who desire unfettered access, set at a frequency that adults over the age of 20 can't hear.
²
Such devices are being used by kids all day—during class, and especially after bed-time, when active chatting and text messaging take the place of sleep.

A story in the
Globe and Mail
newspaper described the problem like this:

It's hard to keep up with all of this, but that's why
slowing down
is so important. Think what a mom or dad who adopts some of the principles of
slow
could do for the kids at home:

In the 1960s an experiment was done to learn just how long a person can go without sleep. A student volunteer, Randy Gardner, was kept awake and active by a rotation of experimenters, who kept him busy doing quizzes and physical coordination tests. He was able to stay involved for nine days before succumbing to total fatigue. Nine days. The interesting thing about this, however, was that once he was allowed to sleep, he slept for just 14 hours and then woke up fully refreshed. His brain and body, just like ours, was able to recover and refresh in a time period far less than the equivalent of nine nights' worth of sleep.

This story illustrates very vividly the value of downtime in all of our lives. An evening with friends or family will do more for your intellect, and therefore your career, than will another all-nighter over the computer. A lunch away from your desk and away from your work will do more for your daylight productivity than will lunch over the keyboard. Calling an official end to the day sets in place the terrific recuperative faculties that all of us contain, physically, inside of us.

This book is obviously about the value of slowing down, primarily in the workplace. This last chapter extends briefly into home life simply to demonstrate how valuable
cooling down
can be for everyone—busy working people as well as their families and friends. Not everyone has school-age kids, of course, but everyone has people with whom they and enjoy mutual support. Are you making enough time in your day, or week, or year to ensure that these people get the best from you—and that you get the best from them? Are the tasks and pressures that you currently face sufficiently important to justify placing these people second or third? Or do these all-consuming tasks just
seem
to be so? Do you have the ability to negotiate alternate dates, deadlines, and deliveries? Can you relate to your manager or customers in such a way as to give yourself permission to go home on a timely basis?