I am uncomfortable thinking about how my perception of time has been colonized by a sickness of speed.
For me, speed used to be symnonymous with what was truly good. It made me believe that kowtowing to this dutiful sense of quickly-get-it-done-now would get me exactly where I wanted to go. It is only now that I see that my expectations signaled towards an attitude of ungratefulness. This sickness was not expressed as some clamoring, nagging disciplinarian but as a quiet, burning candle who promised that this productivity had a purpose.
I let this guest of my mind become the refuge in which I stayed.
Once I had signed up, I became a signpost of anxiety. I constantly reshuffled into enclosed, bounded boxes of thought because I realized these containers of selves allowed me to retain a feeling of safety. These bounds came to be a comforting straitjacket where worry made me feel in control. This was expressed through a throbbing anxiety that what I was doing was not enough.
This itching urge of a rash ungratefulness used to braided into the chords of my being: it told me that I should not be satisfied for all that I have received and who I thought I was. I used to think that this line of thinking would lead me somewhere until I realized it led me straight towards an asymptote of hell. If time was a quilt blanket, I was the needle that declared it to be forever unsewn. It took me beyond time to see the blanket of forgiveness that was already there.
At the current settling of this moment, I am relieved to say that I am no longer colonized by such a device. I now accept an invitation from the poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe: "The times are urgent; Let us slow down."
After all this talk about this sickness, I would like for you to understand how I see slowing down. Slowing down is not moving as life at a snail's pace but an intimate attending of life with a rapt attention of belonging. Slowing down is also not inaction: it is rather action of another kin. A kin of meeting where subject and object coalesce and where the bounds of thought and action collapse.
To spool these threads of thought into conhesion, I like to muse that slowing down one's life is not simply a choice: it is an attitude that is to be cultivated. It is the wholly engrossed child who believes cartography and its very maps to hold the elixir of life. Slowing down means taking tender care of every moment you receive. A nourishing of our apiptude to detect an aroma of the true needs of every moment. Slowing down sustains life.
An amusing thought I like to entertain is that this slow attitude allows time to heal itself as eternity. As we venture as life thinking time to be external to us, I would like for you to ponder: who really is counting?
After cultivating this attitude of slowness, you would think that I know what to do. But I would like it to be known that slowing down is not synonymous with knowing. In fact, it is exaclty the opposite. That unknown is what i live for. An question mark to be lived out on a journey to nowhere. This poem of the poet and essayist Wendell Berry is quite bemusingly fitting:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.