George’s Story
For fast-acting relief from stress, try slowing down.
—Lily Tomlin
Twenty-five years ago, I was teaching a creative writing class in London. Some of my students were young mothers, relieved to find themselves in adult company again after the unremitting demands of their small children; some were middle-aged, with modest private incomes, and the rest were older people, recently retired.
There was a man in this last group whom I’ll call George, a creaky, lanky, doubtful sort of fellow, perhaps in his mid-seventies. I don’t remember his real name. But I do remember his response to one of my assignments. It was the sort of lesson, at least for me as teacher, that I hope I will never forget.
I had asked the class to take some ordinary task—washing the dishes, tidying up the children’s toys – and to tackle it at less than half the usual speed. “Look at the bubbles on the knife-blade as you rinse it,” I told them. “Feel the hot water on your hands. Enjoy that moment when the room is clean, and every single toy is put away.”
The point behind all this, of course, was slowing down: slowing down enough to be there in the present moment, enough so they could notice and describe. I didn’t know much about eastern religions in those days, but what I was proposing was in fact a very basic exercise in what Buddhists would call “mindfulness.”
Several mornings later, everyone gathered around the long oval table to report back on what had happened. George was one of the first to speak. He had a part-time job, he told us, even though he was officially retired. It was a job he had been doing for a great many years. He always walked home along the same few streets, taking the shortest possible route. But the previous afternoon, fulfilling the assignment, he had walked home from work a different way. His face creased with pleasure as he described what he had seen: the pink geraniums in someone’s window-box, the unfamiliar houses. It had taken him perhaps half an hour longer than usual. But he had enjoyed every minute. For the first time in thirty or forty years, his journey had seemed fresh to him, and new.
We live in a culture that is obsessed with speed, a culture wracked by strange illnesses and persistent low-level fatigue. “How are you?” one friend asks another, and the answer is the same, across almost all categories of age and race and class and gender. “I’m just so busy,” people tell each other, half proud, half overwhelmed. “Really, I’m crazy-busy. How are you?”
That it might be possible to arrange one’s life so as to be slightly less frantic has somehow become unimaginable. To claim, like my good friend Arthur, that “I do have time – to go to the gym, to have lunch with a friend,” is looked at slightly askance. It is as if busy had come to equal “interesting,” and “important,” and being hard to get hold of translated, seamlessly, into “social cachet.” This is a world where a reputable catalogue can advertise a program called “Meditation in a New York Minute” selling stress reduction, energy and “intense mental clarity” all at the same time. “You can be super busy, super successful, and super calm,” says executive coach Mike Thornton.
But what if you don’t want to? What if you have come to believe, like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, that “the frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace,” or that “the rush and pressure of modern life, are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence”? What if you’d prefer, in Thoreau’s terms, a “broad” (or at least broader) margin to your days? Then please keep reading. Like George, you may find yourself delighted to take the long way home.
Some Antidotes to Hurry Sickness:
-Be conscious of your pace as you go about your day. Experiment with functioning at different speeds.
-Make a list of slow activities: a long train ride, a hand-written letter, gardening, etc. If possible, do at least one such “slow thing” every week.
Consider the following quotations:
“What was lost? Time varied, elastic and colored. Time local, mischievous and ribboned. Time seasonal, haphazard, red-lettered and unpredictable was gone… Convenienced and colonized. Mapped. Leveled. Privatized. Enclosed. Counted in and accounted out.”
—Jay Griffiths
“Slow down, our sages advise, slow down all the way to the pace of stone and shadow.”
—Diane Ackerman
We just got two rescue puppies and I’m home with them all day. While they’ve brought elements of chaos, they’ve also brought some respite from hurry sickness. On nice days, they love sitting out on the front lawn, watching people walk or bike by or spending some time chewing on a stick. Since we don’t have a fence, I sit with them holding their leashes. Just sitting. Watching the people and cars and stick chewing with them…. Observing and listening, noticing the feel of the light breeze, seeing moths cavorting, watching birds supplying their nests… it is a delightful and unexpected gift from these little fur nuggets.