Schedule Your Slow. Right Away.

Why is it so hard to go slow?

            This is a question that, oddly enough, takes up a lot of space in my mind. There are plenty of potential answers to this question, most of them relating to our amazingly brilliant, intelligent thinking-bodies that have the ability to adjust to our immediate environments. That doesn’t mean that adjustability is ultimately good for us, especially when our bodies align with an environment that consistently produces stress, anxiety, crisis, and constant distractions.

            Notice that I said the environment produces stress, anxiety, crisis, distractions. That’s very different from saying that YOU are stressed, anxious, and distracted. You are not those things – those things are created by our interactions with our environment.

            Our bodies adjust to fast-paced, distraction-heavy, urgent situations as a way to help us survive and thrive in times of need, but staying in that survival mode isn’t good for us as individuals or as a collective.

            But life is so fast-paced, you say.

            Life is not fast-paced or slow-paced. Life is just life.

            Think about the life of a bumble bee. Have you ever watched a bumble bee at work, slowly and patiently hovering around a bloom, then sinking inside a flower and staying there as long as they want or need to? Then the bumble bee buzzes to another bloom. And another.

            Think about the life of a stream. Oh, to be a stream!

            Or maybe think about the life of a tree.

            Pause right there and imagine being a tree and what a tree life might be like.

            That tree image just made me smile…I hope you smiled too.

            What you really mean when you say “life is so fast-paced,” is that human life is so fast-paced.

            And what I mean is, it doesn’t have to be, it shouldn’t be, and it’s not fast-paced for everyone and certainly not all the time. In fact, maybe we should all stop saying that phrase “life is so fast-paced,” because saying it over and over again makes us believe it and probably makes human life feel even more fast-paced.

            So let’s get something straight.

Humans are not the center of life. I know, I know, we tend to really over-emphasize our importance and value in this world, but the earth would flourish without us and in fact it may flourish with much more ease without humans. That idea however – about no humans on earth - gets a little too depressing, and not very helpful given the fact that we are here and have the privilege of being among such beautiful life. So let’s not make ourselves too important in this story of life, and let’s not also make ourselves obsolete or the villain. We are a part of life – entangled with everything around us all the time, even the things that are invisible to us. We are one part of a completely interdependent and connected planet with infinite lifeworlds: fish, birds, mosses, flowers, soil, air, insects, vegetables, water, and on and on and on and on. We are living.

We are living!

That means you, you are living!

Sometimes we forget that simple fact: we are alive, we are living.

So let’s start finding your Slow, to help remind you that you are living.

And let’s be real, not everyone is in a situation where they have to schedule slow time. Some of you reading this have already established a rhythm in your lives where you move through fast-paced, urgent, even crisis situations with relative ease because your body has so much practice coming back to restfulness, mindful gratitude, and a feeling of peace. There might be a feeling of anxiousness or dread or exhaustion or depletion or so many other sensations when you’re moving through these hard hours, days, or even weeks, but when you have given your body practice with coming back to itself, slowing way down, and being withoutdoing, you are giving your body and yourself a beautiful gift of embodied-emotional-spiritual-physical adjustability that just might save you.

For those of you who do need a reminder to schedule your Slow. Here it is.

Put it on your calendar.

Put it on your To Do list.

Protect it like it’s the most sacred thing in the world to you, because you’ll find that is exactly what it becomes.

It’s not easy at first.

I even have a hard time finding my Slow when I’ve been swept up in days or weeks of go-go-go. Lucky for me, I have enough practice that I can recognize that having a hard time slowing down means I need to give myself even more Slow time (you’ll start recognizing that too before long! If it’s hard to be slow, that doesn’t mean speed up, it means you need more slow…you’re almost there). And giving myself a little grace along with more Slow time will eventually lead to me waking up to the present moment in my body and quieting all the things that want to enter my mind.

I’ve lived a recent example of having a hard time coming back to my body, finding my Slow, which started with a wild and demanding month of July.

First it was a rush to the emergency room where capable and compassionate healthcare providers likely saved my life as anaphylactic symptoms took over my body faster than I could track.

I had swallowed a bug.

By accident.

In the woods, of course, one of my favorite places to be.

At dusk.

I wasn’t allergic to the bug, but my immune system detected a dangerous, unwanted object in my body and went into overdrive to try to get rid of the danger and make the body survive. That’s what anaphylaxis is, really, the overreaction of an immune system in an attempt to make sure the body lives on.

Think about all the ways your body and spirit keep pushing forth to make sure you live! To make sure you are alive! The least we can do is work with them with the same kind of zest and enthusiasm.

That experience, along with bags of intravenous adrenaline, antihistamine, and steroids at the hospital to re-regulate my immune system, left my body (and spirit) in a depleted state.

I had a lot of work to do and a lot of people were counting on me in those weeks, and resting for hours during the day was not on my calendar, which made me feel worried and anxious about not doing all the things I felt like I needed to do.

What I really needed to do, however, was rest.

The weeks that followed were filled with “catching up,” which I’m sure some of you are familiar with: connecting with people I hadn’t been able to talk to during my crisis, responding to work emails that sat there for days and sometimes a couple weeks, watering the plants that were getting dry, taking out the garbage that was beginning to stink, doing a load of laundry so I could make it through a couple of days with clean clothes, getting some food that would nourish me, clearing out some cobwebs in the corners of the living room, asking people for extensions on things I had promised, frantically meeting a deadline or two, figuring out what bills I still needed to pay, getting out for longer and longer walks as my body felt stronger, and so much more.

I never fully caught up.

Some things fell away, some things I simply forgot about, and some things I decided weren’t worth the stress they were causing for me so I opted out of them either by apologizing to someone that I had over-committed myself and couldn’t do what I had promised, or by default.

The bottom line is this: there were several weeks when I woke up multiple times during the night to check emails, respond to those that were simple enough to respond to, write a to-do list for the next day, or just toss and turn because my body couldn’t be still. I woke up every morning and “hit the ground running,” so to speak, tending to the many demands of my job, household and family commitments, and still making sure I had some outside time in the woods every day.

            My body adjusted to the high speed and multiple demands of always feeling behind. We made it through, and I just kept telling myself to get to August 6^th when I had protected time on my calendar to Just. Slow. Down.

            August 6^th came with its promised Slow Time, fully protected, but it didn’t seem very slow. I did all the things I know to do when I’m trying to get my body back into the present moment: I ate a slow breakfast, intentionally slowed my breathing, I read from a book – a real live book – before bed, I didn’t scroll on social media, I lit candles, I drank a lot of water, I stretched, I burned some sage, I walked, I slowly made my bed, and so many other things. I know these are the things that help me to embrace being, to embrace being Slow, and while I very much appreciated the time, my body wouldn’t quite settle.

            My slow time the next day wasn’t easy either.

            Yes, I looked at my phone less often.

            I went to bed earlier.

            I did some breathing exercises in the middle of the day to invite myself back to my body.

            I walked, although I couldn’t figure out how to walk slow.

            Then today – August 8^th – the third day in a row when I had protected some Slow on my calendar, I finally felt my heartrate ease, my breath softened, I silenced my phone, I watched a bird.

            I noticed a vine growing on a trellis.

            I sat still and let the breeze flow through me.

            Well hello there Slow, it’s so good to be with you again.

            It was so good to be.

            One of the most magical things about feeling and being with this Slow, is that my body won’t forget; it will bring these connected and grounded sensations with me and when I’m feeling hurried in the next few days it will be easier to pause, breathe, and use that amazing power and energy of being in the present moment to accomplish whatever I need to accomplish.

            Giving yourself the time you need to find your body’s Slow will remind your body what it is capable of doing: Slowing down to be in the moment, even in those hurried, urgent, crisis times.

            So schedule your Slow. Right away.

            A little bit of Slow every day is ideal, but even some sacred I will do nothing else during these two hours on Saturday except to be time once a week can do wonders.

            Protect that time like your life depends on it. Because, well…it kinda does. This is your life, and you depend on it.

            Let the dishes pile up. Get out of bed in the morning and look at the sky, brush your teeth, drink some water, say good morning and I Love You to yourself and a pet and someone you love, and have a big stretch before you do anything else. Ignore the call of the coffee, the vape, the phone, the app, the cigarette, the habit that distracts you and isn’t for your greater good.  

And when you’re in that protected Slow time, turn off your phone.

Okay, fine, at least silence your phone and we’ll come back to this device-dependent-life another day, but I the meantime try to be aware of your power to be without it.  

            Listen, if you’re being Slow and you check your phone and get lost in an app just put it back down when you recognize what’s happening. I told you it’s not always easy being Slow, and it is definitely not easy to resist some unfortunate habits or addiction-like behaviors we have picked up in the fast- and distraction-heavy-world. Give yourself some grace, then put it back down.

            Tell the people who love you that you need their help protecting this time. Then you help protect their time too.

            Right away.