Philosophical Musings of a Book Nerd

Can you believe it. I read Mr Busy, which is about how Mr Busy and Mr Slow go on a picnic and Mr Slow then decides to hide because he likes to take his time doing things and enjoying life, while Mr Busy, like me, tries to cram as much into a day as possible. Well, I go into my study and sure enough, the next Mr Men book sitting on the pile just happens to be Mr Busy. Actually, I'm not entirely sure which one comes first, though I suspect it is Mr Busy because Mr Slow actually talks about the time that he and Mr Busy went on a picnic. However, this story is about Mr Slow, and how he tries to find a place in this world.

Look, I won't go into details, but he does try out a lot of jobs, and the problem is that pretty much all of these jobs need him to be really fast. In fact this seems to be the case with the world in which we live – speed and accuracy are the two things that are valued the most in the business world. Actually, I note that the word business actually contains the word 'busy' (or 'busi'), which suggests that the whole purpose of business is to keep up busy, maybe because if we are busy then we are distracted, and if we are distracted then we aren't going to be in a position to rock the boat. Actually, for most of us we are either busy or poor because if we are rich, and don't have to work, we aren't going to rock the boat because that is going to work against us.

Anyway, the thing about Mr Slow is that he enjoys life, and in fact he has learnt that taking things slow has its benefits. The thing is that I wish I could take things slowly, like spend a lot more time taking in the beauty of the paintings and the sculptures at the Musee D'orsay, or be able to appreciate the weirdness of the art in the Tate Modern. However the problem is that time gets away from us, and before we know it we wake up, we are fifty, and we are wondering what happened to that time between when we were running amok as teenagers and now.

The same goes with books, but the thing with books is that there are so many out there that I simply don't have the time to not only read, but to enjoy, them all. Mind you, there is always the problem of finding a good book and finding a bad book, and with people like me, I simply cannot put a bad, or a boring, book down until I have finished it. It is the same with movies – I can't stop watching a movie until I get to the end, no matter how boring it happens to be. Mind you, that probably has a lot to do with me not being qualified to write a review until I have finished reading the book or watching the movie.

At least Mr Men books are short, sharp, and shiny. However, we should all be like Mr Slow and instead of burning through our dinners and our desert, that we should take our time and really savour the taste.