Expanding Time to Compress Time

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My recent run-ins with all things Slow began shortly after returning from the World Economic Forum on Africa. A colleague I'd met there sent me an essay on "The Importance of a Certain Slowness" by Paul Cilliers, which touches on the Slow Movement and then presents, from a systems perspective, an argument that "the cult of speed, and especially the understanding that speed is related to efficiency, is a destructive one." Furthermore, "a slower approach is necessary, not only for survival, but also because it allows us to cope with a complex world better."

How and where does the quality of slowness fit into events and experiences typically constrained in time and beholden to enormous expectations of outcome? In other words, what is the role of slow in an event designed specifically to compress weeks, months or even years worth of design and decision making into a few days?

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Search Images

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Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.
-Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

Yesterday I read that human creativity is at least 25,000 years older than we previously thought. This made me think of one of my favorite fiction books about creativity, The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel. I don't know that Auel thought that her book was about creativity; rather she was telling an incredible story of survival and emergence of a young Homo sapiens girl being raised by a Neanderthal clan. Her story was rebuked by many scientists and anthropologists and then, with more discovery, Auel's story became quite plausible and many of the ficticious parts in her stories have proven to be fact.

I have heard that 80% of inventions come from the beginner's mind.

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The Power of Play

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“If science always insists that a new order must be immediately fruitful, or that it has some new predictive power, then creativity will be blocked. New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity.

Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself.
Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.”
-David Bohm

Last evening I watched a PBS special on the Power of Play and was fascinated for an hour with the way animals (including humans) use play...

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