It must be five years ago now I started a piece entitled something like “Araf” after the Welsh word for slow painted on to so many of the tight bends of the roads around Snowdon. I was between jobs. Between two of the same jobs, underemployed with my first class honours degree, working in a Wilksons first in my home town and then in Scab City, my university town. I had organised a transfer. Or rather, since I was incapable of doing anything so proactive, so profound was my difficulty with concentration at the time, my manager organised it for me, trying no doubt to earn brownie points. And with a little time in hand I decided to go away with a friend, travelling in Betsy, my first car, a Toyota Corolla I had inherited from my Mum (I have since inherited my second, also Betsy, although not so emphatically, a Corolla identical but for the colour and its prepensity to rust, from my brother).
Tell a lie, it wasn’t this time Snowdonia but The Black Mountains, and we visited Hay-on-wye (my first time and to this day my only visit, despite planning to go all the time). My friend is dyslexic and no great fan of books, and there I was in this Shangrila and too guilty to indulge my pleasure of browsing through the vast book shops of this village of books. I bought just one book, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. The whole week or so we were away I visited the shower block of the campsite once so I could at least have the time he showered to myself, and to read. I was trying so desperately back then to educate myself. I knew I had missed out on so much. That with my inability to concentrate I was still lagging behind. My writing was, of course, not progressing at all and it was with heartbreak and hatred of the place I was born that I decided to move away after the ‘rimming’ trip I have determined for years to write about and never succeeded. Those were what I would come to think of as my wilderness years,so named after an article I had read by a writer who described his own such years as having been passed watching films alone in the middle of the day. In the back of the car that week were two videos I had forgot to bring back and would pay for, chaperoned by my solicitous brother who chided me about the beer cans still in the car, on my return. They were, I think, the beautiful Un Coer en Hiver and Raising Arizona, which was intended as nothing more profound than a destress and which, perhaps for that reason, I never watched.
I was a different person then, fortunately, and so I will be speculating a little to say what the article was to be about. Suffice to say though that it was about my observations of some of the life out there and how it differed, and how I would like to live my own life more slowly.
For those of us with ADHD that will always be the dream. When I suffered more than I do now from bipolar disorder, and the mood problems that dogged my days at university and before, I used to look down on those who took drugs and ended up with mental problems. Much as the aristocracy look down on the nouveau riche, as I would explain in reveries to one professor in particular who had dealings with another lad who had taken far too much in the way of illicit substances, and not quite in the same spirit as the professor himself later suggested I read Nietzche ‘with a little something illicit to hand.’ And so too I suppose I could look down on people who could slow down quite easily if only they took a step back. I don’t. Because their malaise is not self-inflicted in quite the same way.
My latest novel, which doubtless will stall and founder in no time at all as my mind moves on at great pace, is about this problem of our society. My own difficulties are shown, and it is, this time an autobiographical novel, the belief being that this is one I could knock out a little easier than some. Just as I believe Catcher in the Rye describes the alienation of a young man with a clinically significant neurodevelopmental disorder or two but defines too a generation, indeed all subsequent generations, in a society french theorists and those inspired by them tend to enjoy labelling with psychiatric categories, I came to see that the idiotic desires and obsessions that come too often to distract my character in the novel are far from peculiar: the fact that we have so many freedoms and so many choices sees so many of us reeling, wanting everything and wanting to do everything (and everyone who fits our criteria of sexual and romantic suitability).
New Year’s Eve yesterday, and so of course I ate and drank immoderately and now can’t sleep. I got up out of bed to read a little. Catch up on some blogs. I have never really found time to read others’ blogs since I have been writing my own, and that as much as anything leaves my, admittedly highly peculiar, blog unread and unnoticed, depressing me further that not one of my projects is in any way succeeding, that, as Socrates had it, it would be better to do a little well than a great deal badly, and that I am incapable to doing so.
The quote comes from The Slow Down Now Blog, which I shall be adding to my blogroll, not least because of some of the autobiographical stories I read in tonight’s nocturnal browsings. They are the kind of stories I would like to write myself. The last attempt lies still in the 100 tips for Blues Guitar book I haven’t picked up for months, half written in biro on blank paper, another attempt to simplify, to strip it all down.
Since in our slowed down world the journey is as important as the destination, I should add that I had clicked through from http://brent.kearneys.ca/ which I had discovered after running a Google search on my new Canon scanner, to his other blog, Zen Habits, via an article called how to differentiate your blog.
As I have intimated, it takes a lot more effort for someone with ADHD to slow down than someone without. That doesn’t mean it is not worth the effort. And I suppose it is as good a day as any to reaffirm my commitment to doing just that. And I am committed. I do cook slowly. I know that is so important for me. And if I usually do so whilst listening to an audiobook, doing two things at once, that seems to me to be a genuine sop to my brain and the fact that I need some such intellectual stimulation, that it takes me so much longer than anyone else I kow to read a book and that I need it so much more. I am working hard to slow down, and I hope against hope that this might be the year. Hope too, that all these things that I have shown above I have not done, perhaps have not made time for - trips to Wales and to Hay-on-Wye, idle and desultory reading such as I have enjoyed just now because I can’t sleep - I can do this year. Perhaps, too, that I could make time for something such as quigong which the writer of the Slow Blog speaks of. Gardening and woodwork, guitar and writing letters, even just making time to speak to my closest friends who remain, two years after not making time for anyone back here, in Prague, over the MSN, using perhaps the webcam in the monitor I have just ordered..
But then you see, even in my mind on imagining this slowing down, spending time to relax, there is this proliferation of activity.
One can only try.