Carl Honore: Slowing down in a world built for speed

Finally,somebody else who feels like I do! By this, I mean that life does not need be a rat race. Carl Honore is a journalist who wrote a book on slowing down in life, and the benefits that it can provide to not only your health but also your diet, work, and relationships. He has found that "everyone wants to know how to slow down, but wants to know how to do it quickly." There seems to be something wrong with that.
We are a society that is obsessed with speed. The faster the better. We have speed-dialing, speed-dating, speed-walking, speed-reading, and even speed-yoga. Honore says we are a society of "road runner living" and are "hurrying through our lives instead of living them." I could not agree more. In our society, time is money, whereas in other societies, time is based more on the cycles of living. For instance, in Europe people work much less than here in the West (6 week vacations are the norm). The outcome-productivity goes up. The Nordic countries are a prime example of this.
This is a topic I have thought about quite often. It seems everybody has to be on 24/7. Cell-phones are attached to ones body almost as if they have grown another appendage. We have to constantly be on the go. Family dinners around the dinner table are practically non-existant. I worry about children the most. It is like they are on overdrive all the time with homework, extra-curricular activities, camps, jobs, cell-phones, text-messaging, or video games. Nobody knows how to just sit and daydream anymore. Even the idea of just sitting and reading a book seems to make people nervous. It is like they cannot physically slow down enough to just sit. Even people who go on vacations seem to take the first 2-3 days just to unwind enough to relax. I think there is alot to be learned from the Europeans and the way they live life.
As mentioned previously, they all take six weeks of vacation. The shops in most countries shut down in the afternoons for 2-3 hours, and people go home and take naps or just rest. This is a fact in Italy. Around 5, the shops reopen.Europeans take time to shop the markets for their foods, cook them themselves, sit down to family meals, and just enjoy what they are eating and eath others company. Rushing through fast food is not their normal way. They just seem to savor the simple ways of living and you can tell just by looking at them that they they seem more relaxed. Americans on the other hand, always seem to have a nervous energy about them. Maybe it is time for us all to remember that we are all going to die one day, and that life is not so much about the race, but enjoying the journey. Take the time to just look up at the sky on a sunny day, or really look at a flower that is blooming in a garden. Notice the birds singing, and pay attention to that piece of cake or slice of pizza you are eating.You might be pleasantly surprised.