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| Slow down and
cure yourself of hurry sickness HAVE a close look at the "close door" button next time you\'re in a lift. Chances are it is the most worn-looking button -- another visible symptom of our accelerated age. A US study found that "close door" buttons were disabled on most lifts, but they remained, at least in part, to give people a sense of having more control. Did you know TV interviews are routinely compressed slightly to remove the "annoying" pauses of normal speech that take up too much time? And consider this. There\'s a restaurant in Tokyo that offers an all-you-can-eat service charging customers by the minute. It\'s very popular. As US art collector and publisher Malcolm Forbes says, there is never enough time, unless you\'re serving it. That\'s why we have instant coffee, instant intimacy, instant gratification, instant replay in a world dominated by instant access mobile phones, easily reached remote controls and high-speed computers. Many of us say life moves too fast. It\'s as if man was made for clocks rather than vice versa. We have time-saving devices that verge on the ridiculous -- think of the flotation phone for those who like to chat in the bath. Perhaps we secretly revel in the fast pace of life, evidenced by the naming of the welcome feeling of sudden exhilaration as "a rush". And we generally idolise Type A personalities: pushy, competitive, impatient people who are always in a hurry. James Gleick in his book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything writes about what he calls hurry sickness in this era of the nano-second. For all the hours, minutes, and even seconds being saved, we are still filling our days to the point that we have no time for basic human activities such as eating properly and relating to our families and friends. A group of Italian clerics tried, a few years ago, to persuade followers to boycott fast-food outlets because they were not "spiritually nutritious". In effect, the clerics tried to have the hamburger excommunicated. Out of that came an international organisation called Slow Food that promoted the idea of using time better by not rushing everything. The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev said: "Time sometimes flies like a bird and sometimes it crawls like a snail; but a man is happiest when he does not even notice whether it passes swiftly or slowly." "Don\'t say you don\'t have enough time," he wrote. "You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein. They just learned to use time properly." What is this thing called time anyway? Thomas Mann noted that what we call time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. "Even when a new century begins, it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols," said Mann. God exists in eternity and the only point where eternity meets time is in the present. We need to slow down to feel and know we are eternal. If we pay close attention, we might be able to feel the rhythm that is creation. That\'s vital because heaven can be gained or lost in one tiny moment. Robert Louis Stevenson said the best things in life were nearest: the breath in our nostrils, light in our eyes, flowers at our feet, the path of right before us. But the road from here to eternity was not always apparent in the rush of this temporal life. "Do not grasp at the stars, but do life\'s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life," he said. Perhaps we need to slow down -- and go barefoot more. A US study found that people who regularly kick off their shoes under a table or desk live three years longer than the average. A Swedish proverb that makes sense advises: "Fear less, hope more, eat less, chew more, whine less, breathe more, talk less, say more, love more, and all good things will be yours."
Cure yourself with water
Cure yourself of the affliction
of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you
appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have
of you.
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