Have you ever thought of slowing down, leaving the rat race behind and having a mellow life? Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Who hasn't? But let's get real here. There's bills to pay and money needed to pay them. You get money by working. Real hard. Not just sitting around wishing it was all better. It sounds like an off shoot theory that one of those far-flung liberal rags came up with to make the rest of us sound uptight.

     Not so, according to Carl Honoré, the author of the book, "In Praise of Slowness". From revolutions such as the Italian-based Slow Food movement to home offices to job sharing and home schooling, Honoré documents clear cases of organizations and schools of thought that are seeking to bring more "slow" living to the forefront. The overdrive lifestyle is becoming less vogue as people realize the toll spiritually, physically, emotionally, and even economically it takes on them. There is even a "Tempo Giusto" movement in the classical music world which seeks to slow down the tempo of performance. Even Bach is rushing around too much nowadays. Imagine how much more live people do.

     The idea of slowing down sometimes sounds crazy because there is so much to do and so much to get done. Realistically, how would anything get done if everyone was just hanging around, slowing down? Wouldn't things just collapse, with everyone becoming hippies? Communism would take over with all this laziness. After all, America became great on the idea of industry. Didn't the Founding fathers stress hard work over anything else? What would happen to our lives?

     Perhaps people would be surprised to learn that the Founding Fathers never really intended relentless work weeks. Certainly, a strict constructionist of the Constitution would point out that there is nothing in it that legislates backbreaking work. Even though Ben Franklin is the person responsible for coining the term, "Time is money", he also predicted that technological breakthroughs of the 1700's would yield into a life of leisure. Then, man would only work four hours a week. Perhaps he intended that people be efficient in order to reap the benefits of ample leisure.

     Of course, Franklin's short work week became merely a pipe dream for the history books. The Industrial Revolution invented the punch clock, assembly lines and factory workers. With so much industry around, someone had to be around to preside over it. And the inevitable result from competition led to the crunch we are all too familiar with now. In order to survive, businesses had to produce more in less time than their rivals. This is still true today. Which, inevitably leads to a lot of rushing around on the part of the populace.

     But the mad rush has taken its toll. Sleep aids, analgesics, and remedies for impotence are some of the most popular products advertised. Fully one-half of all traffic accidents are blamed on tiredness, according to a study by the US National Commission of Sleep Disorders, as lack of sleep impairs motor coordination and reflexes. Schedules are so hectic that spouses have less than five minutes together, and parents and children barely know one another, to say nothing of the damage to friendships. Communication has been reduced to a sound byte of e-mail.

     The Slow movements seek to reverse this trend. Whether it is taking time out to cook a meal, go on meditation retreats, or learn Tai Chi, the point is to learn to curtail the madness. It is, in essence, a means for one to take back control one's life. From my own experience, the faster I go, the more mistakes I make. In stressing myself so much in order to meet some rushing need, I'm less able to relax, and then less able to sleep at night. To compensate for the lack of sleep, I rush about. And the cycle continues. This became apparent to me on a recent vacation where I slept more in one week than I had in the previous month. I felt sharper, clearer, and more creative ideas were apparent to me. Of course, the decompression that comes from a hiatus probably had something to do with it, but the point was that in relaxing, I slept more, and actually thought more efficiently than when I was wracking myself with stress.

     Perhaps a well-worn allegory could sum up the whole slow movement. Most people know about the race between the tortoise and the hare. Though the hare had speed on his side, in the end, the tortoise won through slow diligence. The analogy still holds the same sway for adults as it does as a children's fable. And it certainly makes intuitive sense: rushing about is likely to make you prone to errors, while relaxing one's mind is likely to make one see more possibilities. The trick is the application of this thinking in a busy world. It's a paradox of slowing down to remember, and remembering to slow down.