Modern city life is very fine, but we might be missing something in our rush.

I recently took a short break, driving north to southern Queensland. My task was to pick up a puppy from a farm about 30 kilometres from a town some 300 kilometres west of Brisbane.

The people I met lived a very different life from that which we live here in Sydney. They were an active and enterprising mature farming couple that had lived on the land all their lives long.

The first difference I noticed was the pace at which that they existed. I was struck by the slow laconic pattern of their speech. Compared to theirs, I felt as though my own words were a machine gun rapid fire filled with tension.

This juxtaposition between their experience of time and mine was continued when they insisted on driving out from their property to the highway so I would not miss the turn off. Taking an hour out of their lives just to be helpful and hospitable was their natural norm.

As we drove from the turn off, my car following theirs, I became aware of how fast hurtling down the highway at 100 km/hr really is. At the speed of the farmers the previously boring blur of bush became beautiful in detail.

We drove down the dirt road together at about one third as fast as the speed limit indicated. Where we live, to drive this slowly would without doubt invoke the consternation of other drivers, and very likely their abuse.

On reaching their humble home, complete with a tame kangaroo roaming through the kitchen, we were invited to drink tea and talk. Discovering their balance of privacy and candour, their isolation and self-sufficiency with their community integration, offering and receiving assistance when there was need, I was struck by the simultaneous simplicity and sophistication of their lives.

Having shared time with these people I felt myself slow, as though becoming infected by their calm. As a result I may be in less of a rush to be anywhere other than where I am right now.

Martin Hunter Jones is an honorary life member of the Australian Counselling Association. He has a practice on the Northern Beaches. Phone 9973 4997.