"The Unhurried Life" by Solvita Krese
For many years now I have done my best to spend a week of each short and inconstant Latvian summer by the sea. Over the past few years this has usually been my one and only week of vacation, snatched from the pileup of unending work assignments and obligations. This life is my own choice, of course, but the vague feeling that just maybe it would be nice to do things differently still creeps around my preoccupied mind, blowing up some bastion of densely planned daily agenda every now and then.
The vacation week of this summer is spent in Mazirbe, an ancient Liv village on the sea coast. There is no TV, no computer, just walks along the seaside, and family board games and visiting with the neighbours at night. One of them, film director Juris Poškus, shows me around the local ‘supermarket’. We get on our bicycles and set out in the Dundaga direction; we visit a homestead, where the lady of the house ushers us into the cowshed to pour fresh milk into the glass jars we have brought with us. From there, we go to the ‘egg department’. The farmer shoos away some chickens and ducks and gathers up a couple dozen eggs for us. In the drinking water department we are greeted by a forest stream, and right next to that there is a ‘display’ of mushrooms. I feel excited and happy, and I suspect this tickly feeling of happiness is caused by the exclusive nature of this privilege and by holidaymaker’s euphoria. Or has the desire to slow down our daily life grown into a full-blown, acute necessity? Perhaps downshifting has now become an essential component of the contemporary human’s survival kit?
Downshifting is a difficult-to-translate concept which denotes slowing down in order to critically evaluate the commonly accepted consumerist standards and notions of success, emphasize the need for balance between work and leisure, and focus on personal development and ‘leaving the rat race’ imposed by modern society. Downshifting has become a widespread global movement and code of social behaviour, and as such has now become the inspiration for the creators and artists of this year’s "Survival Kit" festival.
By reorienting the usual hierarchy of values, refusing to accept the continuous demand for ever-increasing productivity or profit generation, reducing personal daily consumption, respecting natural resources and setting aside more time to listen to ourselves and those around us, we can create a survival kit that is highly suited for individual use. Perhaps there is a lot to gain from challenging the capitalist system’s control of our time and dismantling the regulated ratio of working hours and leisure, or free time we may spend on creative fulfilment or simple enjoyment of life. ‘Escaping the rat race’ can sometimes be a strong incentive to change circumstances that have become cumbersome or unbearable. Over the past ten years, ‘withdrawal’ has also become a popular practice in art, which calls for avoidance of mainstream processes and places the emphasis on the autonomy of the artist.
We may also view the manifestations of downshifting as just another whim of the Western world, ‘the new simplicity’, another lifestyle trend that can be developed and perfected on the back of a well-established system of social guarantees and various support mechanisms. It is most likely that in ‘New Europe’ downshifting is more often a reality imposed by external circumstances; an unwanted situation that has to be accepted. It could even be said that many people in Latvia find themselves in endless downshifting mode... socially unprotected, unsure of their future, armed with a number of newly acquired skills – capable of growing their own food in their garden allotments, pickling and preserving the harvested fruit and vegetables to survive the long winter, transforming second-hand clothing into innovative designer outfits, endlessly recycling and reusing everyday consumer goods to extend their lifespan and give them new function.
A highly romanticized view of this alternative life strategy is presented by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods, a book that could be considered the holy writ of downshifting. On 4 July 1845, the 27-year-old Thoreau left for the woods. He settled near Walden Pond and built a cabin in which he spent two years, two months and two days, living a simple and unhurried life and working on his book. ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary,’ Thoreau writes in his book.
To avoid resignation and not settle for living what is not life... How do you answer such an all-encompassing question: What is life? Hasn’t work taken up the main space in the life of the contemporary human being? Work has changed from necessary means of earning daily bread into occupation, identity shaper and measure of success, as well as pastime. The traditional perception of work has significantly changed in the post-Fordian era; the daily allocation of work and leisure hours has become more flexible, merging the boundaries between the various spaces and roles of our lives.
Profit, growth or development is one of the most important concepts in economic terminology, and is used as the equivalent of success. The vision of future as a continuous upward curve of economic growth is not only inspiring to economists and politicians; it also motivates many individual consumers. Tied to GDP numbers, this growth is essentially a monetary value, the cash flow that circulates in the economy, and has no direct impact on the growth of an individual’s personal sense of well- being or some general social happiness.
Perhaps by living more simply and unhurriedly, by replacing profit with sustainability, creativity with creating, consuming with thinking, economic boom with high quality cultural space we will become happier, wiser and more self-sufficient.
Having compared the artists of Western and Eastern Europe, Serbian artist Mladen Stilinović observes that westerners lack laziness, the free thinking space in which to create. Here, it seems, it would be quite appropriate to reference one of the most influential and radical artists of the 20th Century, Marcel Duchamp, who says in an interview: ‘I would have wanted to work, but deep down I’m enormously lazy. I like living, breathing, better than working. [..] Therefore, if you wish, my art would be that of living: each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral. It’s a sort of constant euphoria.’
Perhaps art helps us reach this euphoria and develop the capability of rejoicing in a simple and unhurried life. ‘The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind,’ advises John Cage, who himself lived a surprisingly modest and richly saturated life. It is important not to miss the moment when a sober mind offers up the right solution – and it may happen you don’t even need to move to a cabin in the woods to hear this call.