I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
SAR 5: Be Slow
- You think speed isn’t an issue in your life? I just brainstormed a few places (quickly!) that I notice the ‘speed demon’ in my own life: needing to be on time, needing to squeeze a lot of errands into one trip to town, instant email expects instant answer, expectation that cooking should be fast and easy, eating on the run, not eating together, impatience with slow movers and talkers, impatience with ‘slow’ computer speeds and drivers, magazines that promise fast weight loss and make you feel like a failure if you don’t drop 30 pounds in 20 days, expectation that money or success should be instant, valuing time as money and then not giving away any except for ‘productive’ purposes. Does any of that sound familiar? I’m experimenting with how long I can go in a day without looking at the clock….letting sunshine wake me, knowing it’s time for breakfast because I’m done with my prayer and exercise; moving to the next schoolwork when we’re done with this work, or tired of it….but of course, I like the clock for NAPTIME!!
- Speed, like noise, is an assault on my sensibilities, so it likewise induces me to shut down. There is no way I can attend to fast-moving images, or to people if I or they are speeding by. I can’t stop to wonder, to gaze, so I tend to shut out sensory ‘beckoning’ and my soul ‘flattens’, tenses, or braces in a way that is deforming, or at least, destructive.
- Speed is a form of violence, because it pushes past the human ‘scale’ of movements, or attention, or response. We feel that, at some level, as injury, and in defending against, or at least bracing against it, we lose interior spaciousness.
- The more we value speed, the less we value hand-making things, face-to-face communication, the arts, learning new skills, rest, a view of landscapes, a sense of geography and place. We devalue correspondence and the beauty of our friends’ handwriting…children and old, or feeble people, are more of a burden when we are speeding through life…we lose patience with the pace of real conversations. If we’re breaking the law by speeding in a vehicle (I can speak of this, as a reformed speedster!), we’re devaluing law and legitimate authority (and perhaps also, safety). Soooooo, whatever is gained, if it’s gained without any thought about what is lost, there’s a big disconnect…..
- We run from the demand of choosing by ignoring/blocking many of the options (pretending we are choosing ‘freely’, but without clear information and consideration of all the possibilities.) At the other extreme, we might run to others, allowing them to choose for us, or just paralyze ourselves and refuse to choose at all, letting ‘circumstances’ (and thus, whoever is most powerful to control those events) decide for us. It’s a little scary to realize what a subset of reality most people are operating within….freedom is a demanding and sometimes scary place to be, and there are lots of ways of avoiding it!
- Rest feels to me like a tide going in and out at the beach. Because that’s a peaceful image for me, it adds to the sense of peaceful, predictable rhythm that is the ‘background music’ of my life. Interestingly, the practice of praying the Divine Office feels to me like a dip into a deep, refreshing pool of water. It really is, in a way, as eternity is the ocean of Divine Mercy, right? I think of C.S.Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia – the image of the in-between world where they jumped into pools that became whole other worlds. He must have had a taste of the kind of Sabbath refreshment I’m talking about!
- When I am well-rested, I have more patience with wait-and-see. I am less demanding that events resolve for me NOW (a demand for speed) and can avoid precipitate decisions (again, NOW, SPEED!). I have a greater sense of the ebb and flow of time and so a greater presence in the here and now, where grace is actually available to me. Life is really a big ‘betweenness’, and rest helps so much to accept that. I love the movie Groundhog Day, because the guy comes to grips with the awful ‘betweenness’ of life creatively (it would be awful, if we were not sure there is an end to time, and an eternity that follows).
- Wonder contributes to my fullness, because it opens me to new discoveries. I feel I am in a treasure-house and that around every corner there might be some new delight from God. Even at Disney-World (yuk – I hated that whole day!!!) wonder at a REAL little (non-animatronic, thank God!) bird restored my sense of delight. I have taught a poetry class for a group of kids and my favorite moment was when NH said his learning to ‘look through’ a flower had led him into a whole world that seemed so real and amazing….all because he began to realize the world is WONDER-full!
- Efficiency and technology both, usually, mean SPEED…under the guise of making life better for us, they sometimes end up just conforming us to a machine. I think of McDonalds making its franchise less and less people-dependent, by having machines take over more functions, and reducing employees to automatons who don’t have to think, but just respond to beeps and buzzers – effectively becoming extenstions of the machines that control ‘em . I think of factory workers and night-shift workers, and people whose jobs are derailed to other countries by computer technology. I am not against technology, and I like some aspects of life to run with efficient speed, but I see, I realize, that human beings are more and more being deformed by ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’. The qualities that make us human are often ‘problems’, and we may be ‘solving’ ourselves right out of the picture, if we aren’t careful!
- You think of speed and stagnation as opposites, but in either direction from the freedom and the measure of the human person lies the same thing: BONDAGE, or death. Speed can be bondage to the demands of a machine, or boss, or schedule. Stagnation can be the bondage of impotence (ever been paralyzed??) – lack of power to effect change, or to realize ideas.
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