I like the fact that a Finnish supermarket chain has introduced a Slow Checkout Lane for people who don’t want to be rushed or flustered.
I confess that – as a frequent business traveller – I’m the sort of impatient tutter (yes, that may well be Cockney
Rhyming Slang) who’s always looking for the quickest route from A to B, the express bag drop, the beat-the-queue option.
But luckily there are times when we’re working for a destination where life’s lived at a different pace, which forces me to get out of this hyper-active groove and smell the coffee. And there are places we work in that are so spectacularly beautiful that you just have to stand and stare.
Take last week: Lorna and I were in South West Ireland working with the national tourism development agency – Fáilte Ireland. We’re helping local tourism stakeholders on the Dingle Peninsula to develop a common understanding – a shared story – to guide destination development as well as marketing.
We drove onto the Peninsula, which lies at the most westerly edge of Europe, early one evening. A full moon was shining across the bay between Dingle and the Ring of Kerry – laying a silver carpet across the rippling water and silhouetting the mountains.
Important meetings lay ahead. But the remoteness, the dark skies and silver sea – and then (later that same evening) the warm hospitality – slowed things down in a very welcome way.
Of course millions of people look to travel to help them shed layers of stress, built up by an everyday life lived at a frantic pace. Going “someplace different from home” – whether rural or urban, mountains or coastline – helps us take stock and find new perspectives.
And with the increasing pace of change in many lives, Slow Travel is more important than ever. In the words of Oslo University’s Professor Guttorm Fløistad, writing about the Slow philosophy: “In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal.”
And that’s one of the best arguments for travel and tourism I’ve heard.
*Paul Simon