Journal of Sacred Work

There is more to life than increasing its speed.  – Gandhi

Yes, we slow pokes can see a lot. – Thomas L. Turtle in Scotty the Snail, by Erie Chapman   

   I asked my wife what I should write to you today. She said, "Write about how everyone is rushing so much. People are in more of a hurry now than they were when I was a little girl. Everybody rushes around the grocery story like it’s on fire," she said recently. "What’s the big emergency?"
   I don’t know if people are rushing more or not, but if they are, why?  We’ve got all these labor saving devices – all those things that were supposed to give us more leisure time. Dishes can be dropped into machines that wash and dry them. Same with clothes. Food can be microwaved hot in seconds, teeth brushed electronically, cars washed in less than a minute, letters emailed in miliseconds.
   Now that these tasks are done for us by machines, what are we doing
with our free time? Are we conversing with each other at ever deeper
and more sophisticated levels? Are we plumbing the depths of wisdom
literature, reading more, taking greater opportunities to help our
fellow humans in need?…

   Oops. Probably not. Most people tell
me they don’t have any free time for great endeavors. They’re
always in a rush. These same people somehow manage to
keep up with the Desperate Housewives, track the latest American Idol, learn who survived on Survivor.
Then there are video games. Got to save time for those. And there is
the computer on which you are reading these words. Computers can suck
more time from our lives than anything I’ve encountered. Time may be
cheap, it seems, but it sure ain’t free.
   In the years after World War II, the western world got to celebrate all the freedoms won. The victory of democracy left us to pursue our most lofty dreams. But the voice of comfort is deeply seductive. Most people used far more energy fighting the war than they did celebrating the peace. All those men and women that died for us have left us with endless choices on what to do with our time.   
   Some of us seem so exhausted by our choices that we squander our freedoms. Caught in the grip of velocity, we race through life as if, to quote reader Sonya Jones, our "hair is on fire." We ignore Victor Frankl’s advice that "success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue."   

   Caregivers seem as harried as any group I know. Doctors rush to see the next patient, nurses rush to cover the challenges of patient demands and piles of chart work, social workers struggle with waiting lists.
   Patients, on the other hand, seem to be the one group that would like to be in a hurry but isn’t. Stuck in the waiting rooms of the world, patients leaf through magazines wondering when, if ever, their names will be called. One would think patients would be grateful for a chance to rest. Instead, we sit like prisoners waiting to be sentenced.
   The British writer and poet, David Whyte, speaks eloquently about the American problem with velocity. He wonders why we, like Europeans, don’t all slow down. We will reach our goal if we recognize that the journey is the goal, he says. In his book Crossing the Unknown Sea, Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, Whyte points out, "The great tragedy of speed as an answer to the complexities…of existence is that very soon we cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity as we are." 
   Someone slows down, and we wonder what’s wrong with them. Of course, most artists have learned to slow down to see and hear. We need to do the same and learn how to be present to what they have discovered for us.
   Since we spend so much of our lives going to or coming from places, why not use these times to truly live our lives? Since the only thing we really have is our time, why not engage every moment of it now instead of looking past it to the future.
   A friend of mine, a nurse named Holly, says she likes to pray at stop lights. What a fine alternative to tapping the steering wheel trying to make red turn green.  Another friend uses the drive to and from work as private time to reflect on his life and loves. He doesn’t turn on the radio. "Why let a voice on the radio dominate my thoughts?" he asks. "This is my time to rest and to breathe." A third friend reports that when he’s stuck in a traffic jam, he likes to look around at the other drivers and think, "Great! This slow down will give me more time to reflect."
   I’ve never liked the old adage, "haste makes waste." I don’t like truths that rhyme anyway because they seem to replace real thinking with platitudes. But the waste created by haste is often life itself. In the course of racing around the grocery store, our blood pressure rises and our quality of life goes down. In the course of waiting for the next thing to happen in a good movie, we may miss the artistic experience. We may even speed through a great book just to see how it ends and, in the course of that race, lose the truth and beauty of great literature.

    I like the wisdom of the author of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, "To live means to experience – through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have." (emphasis added)
    He’s right. And that’s why speed kills. Velocity robs us of the best gifts of life.
    In a children’s book I wrote called Scotty the Snail (www.amazon.com) Thomas L. Turtle asks his slow moving friend Scotty this question: "Have you ever noticed all the things you and I see that the other animals don’t?"
   Have you noticed? Take time, now, to draw in a deep breath. Slow your breathing. Look up from the computer. What you see, at a slower pace, is all the things your faster moving friends are missing. What you see, now, is your life.