Monday, February 4, 2013

On the Beauty and Grace of Slowing Down


About a month ago, around the time of the new year, I decided I wanted to work on slowing down. For me, hurrying is mostly a state of mind.  When I’m hurrying, I keep thinking about the next thing I have to do instead of what I’m doing now.  I keep worrying that I’ll be late, that I won’t have time to do what I need to do, that I should be doing something else.  I feel like I have to do everything all at once instead of one thing at a time.  Those thoughts make me tense; they lead to an anxious, slightly irritable, unpleasant body feeling.  I hate that feeling and I want to slow down and stop feeling it as much as I can.
I have to say I’ve already made a lot of progress with slowing down by using my own harnessing time tools.  Still, sometimes lately I’ve noticed myself feeling rushed no matter what was going on, as if the feeling had a life of its own, or had become a habit I was unconsciously holding onto in my body.  So I decided to see if I could come up with some reliable ways to slow down.
            Just those words -- slow down -- give me a taste of what I want.  When I slow down I feel notably more peaceful, restful, expansive. It’s like something in me -- some tense tightly held thing, like a big energetic clenched fist -- relaxes, releases, opens up.  It takes energy to clench a fist, and it takes energy – a lot of energy – to be constantly straining, rushing, worrying, hurrying.  Slowing down is a way to conserve energy, to rest your mind and your body – your inner energetic self -- while you’re awake no matter what you’re doing.
            One way to slow down is to plan to do less on any given day.  We can make fewer appointments, take whole days off where we don’t do anything but rest or schedule time for resting among our other regular stuff.  We can simplify our lives.  Those are all beautiful and even necessary ways to slow down.  But I wanted to find a way to slow down that wouldn’t depend on changing something on the outside; I wanted to see if I could slow down all the time.   I wanted to see if I could slow down in my head.
            Since I started working on this, I’ve noticed that one thing that helps me slow down is to be consciously aware of how much time I’ve actually got.  This helps me stop focusing on how much time I don’t have, how much I have to cram into the little time there is, et cetera.  When I plan my day every day, I write down what I have to do, but I also – and here’s the important part – think about from what time to what time I’m going to do each thing.  Doing this can work as an emergency measure at any time during any day.  So if you’re feeling rushed or like you’ve got too much to do and there isn’t enough time to do it and/or you don’t know where to start and/or your day just isn’t going well because you can’t get any traction with all those things you’ve got to do, here’s what I suggest:  Sit down, consider how much time you’ve actually got to work with – so, say, maybe two hours, from two to four in the afternoon – and then budget that time, considering realistically what you can do during it and how much time each thing is going to take.  So you might decide to clean your kitchen from two to two-thirty, fill out two job applications on-line from two-thirty to three, and work on the article you’re writing from three to four.  Making the plan forces you to be realistic about what you can get done (and let go of what you can’t) and it also forces you to set some priorities.  Once you’ve made the plan you can peacefully work your way through it and at the end of the day you can feel good because, even if you didn’t get everything done, you got something done.
I’ve gotten into the habit of planning my whole day that way every day and I absolutely love it.  And when I start to feel rushed, I make myself stop and look at the clock to see what time it is.  Then I look at my plan to see what I’m supposed to be doing now and what time I have to start doing the next thing on my list.  I might see, for example, that I have a coaching appointment (I make my living as a writing coach) at nine-thirty a.m., and it’s nine o’clock now.  Maybe I wanted to do yoga but had started to feel like there wasn’t time and then I started to rush, to speed up on the inside and/or the outside.  But now that I’ve looked at the time I realize I have a whole half hour and that I can do my yoga – or as much of it as I can get done – in that half hour.  In that moment I stop rushing and slow down:  I’ve got enough time to do yoga.  Or maybe I look at the clock and see that it’s nine-twenty-five and there isn’t time to do yoga before my coaching appointment.  I make a decision – I won’t do yoga today, or I’ll do it later, between three and three-thirty this afternoon – I let go of feeling like I have to rush to do it now, and I slow down. 
So, slowing-down insight number one:  Feeling rushed is a by-product of living unconsciously, of being unconscious about time.  Slowing down is about being conscious of how much time there actually is – in the moment, in today.  It’s about planning how we’re going to use our time; it’s about thinking about how much time things take, how much time we have; it’s even about knowing what time it actually is.  This may seem counter-intuitive – slowing down seems like it should be about something light, free, airy, not about nailing things down and looking at clocks and so forth. But it makes sense when you think about it. It makes sense because what you know is a lot less scary than what you don’t know.  When you’re rushing you’re living in the fear thoughts inside your head – there’s not enough time, I can’t get anything done, etc.  But when you look at the clock and think about how much time you have and how you’re going to use that time, then you can relax, slow down, and live in the real world where things are actually a lot less frightening.
                                                                                  
                                                                         -- Mary Allen
                                          

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