I can be really slow sometimes. I don't mean slow in a good and intended way, I mean slow on the uptake. There are so many things that I think I understand, but still find not so easy to implement.
Way back in June 2020, I wrote a piece entitled Learning to Slow. We were in lockdown. I'd gotten through my major wobble and was really starting to enjoy the enforced slowness of life. I thought I'd got it sussed.
As it turned out, no. Not really.
Fast forward to March 2022.
It does feel like we have fast-forwarded. I have clear recollections of 2020, but much of 2021 seems to have passed in a blur. What happened? I don't know. But here we are, March 2022 and my good friend is cooking in my kitchen. I'm clearing blossom from the dining table and laying place settings. Part of the conversation went like this:
Me: I've figured out that what I really need to do is slow down.
Jay: (with a hint of humour): I could have told you that.
Me:(laughing) Not only could you have, angel, you have been telling me, over and over, for how long is it now that we've been talking? A year and a bit, more than?
The irony doesn't escape me. My Twitter tag-line is Living a simpler, slower, less pressured life…
And here I am only just now recognising that the things I still need to change to bring my life into full alignment are all tied into this notion of slowing down.
Slowness is the key to everything I am wanting to achieve. I've been talking about it for nearly four years. I enjoyed the enforced slowness of 2020. But only now as the world starts to ratchet up again do I realise that I am only part-way there.
Before I go on, let me be clear about why slow matters.
Timothy Shieff talks about the need for slow in learning Rope Flow. He says that slow becomes smooth, smooth becomes fast. We have to learn the patterns by slow repetition. Trust me, I've smacked various parts of my body with a Rope often enough to know that this is the only way. You start to get cocky? The Rope shows you exactly where you are in your learning. I'm sure that's not what the man means when he says it is a feedback tool, but true all the same. Not all feedback is pleasant.
Jay talks about the need for slow in learning Tai Chi. You have to learn A to B to C, before you can flow from A to C, he tells me. And then says something like and then when you can flow through from A to P or to Z, then you come back and slow it all down again, so you can go deeper. Maybe he didn't exactly say that, but that's what I understood. I'm still at A to B to C…mostly.
I was taking part in a poetry reading today, and one of the writing group had this advice for me: read more slowly.
In the more general sense of living my life, what I have worked out for myself (eventually, like I say, it's taken a while) is that without slow there cannot be simple, without slow there cannot be mindful, without slow we lose awareness, consciousness, presence.
Walk slow to feel yourself walking and to experience the land you are walking through.
Swim slow to align your breathing to your stroke.
Work slow to find your way into flow.
To repeat a quote I come back to time and again, this one from Satish Kumar "whatever the question, the answer is simplicity." The conundrum is how to achieve simplicity.
A friend once told me that when they drive fast it feels like their body is getting ahead of their soul, and that it is only a little while after they have slowed down or stopped, that they catch up with themselves and feel whole again. I feel I have been experiencing something similar, but in reverse…that my life has started to slow down, but part of me (the part trained over decades in the world of work) is still running ahead at the old speed. And I need how to figure out the braking mechanism for that part, so it can decelerate to the new momentum.
Finally, I have come to understand that I have been addressing things from the wrong end. I thought that if I simplified my life, it would become slower. That turns out not to be quite the case.
Simplifying life does initially lead to less stress, and that makes you think you are living more slowly, but there is a limit to how far that can take you.
Everything I worked out during lockdown holds true, but there is a point at which I found I had to start working from the other end.
You cannot simplify at pace. You cannot be present at speed. You – and by 'you' I mean me and anyone else who thinks this might be worthwhile – have to slow down first.
If we slow down, then simplicity simply emerges. Simplicity becomes necessary, because we have to start choosing how to spend the limited number of hours in every day. We recognise that we (simply) cannot do everything. We realise that we never could. We were simply running on the outside of the wheel that spins more quickly than the centre of the wheel, but doesn't travel any further or any faster.
When we slow, we find ourselves choosing how to spend each individual hour of the day – not in advance, this isn't about scheduling – but in the moment.
When we slow down, we do what we are doing until it is done. Or until we have done enough of it for one day. And then we stop.
When we slow down, we find that we have no need to multi-task, no need to be rushing onto the next thing. We bring ourselves to this thing, this one thing that we have started to spend this next stretch of time doing – be it five minutes or an hour or a morning or a whole day: just this one thing.
We give our presence to our work, to our play, to our family, our friends, our selves, the planet. Whoever, whatever, here, now.
We prioritise what matters, when we can only have one thing. Or at most two – I will admit that I still read while I eat lunch, watch TV over dinner, if I'm eating alone. And maybe I will move past that too in due course. When we prioritise what matters, we slowly notice what is not receiving our attention and we allow it to fall away. And so life becomes simpler.
And the wheel turns. To borrow from Timothy: Slower becomes simpler becomes slow becomes simple.
But of course…that process in itself takes however long it takes, and cannot be rushed.
