I have been up all night frantically trying to get ready for an early morning flight to Switzerland. Sifting through the pile of papers on my desk to try to find my plane ticket, I came across this: it is by a woman named Emily Carson, and it's entitled "Slow":
"Keeping pace with the world is more than you can manage. Keeping up is not possible. It is the great gift of this age that we are now, finally, headed too fast to ever keep up with. There is no choice but to fail. And so, I say, slow down. Not because it is better, not because it is virtuous, but because you have failed, because you cannot any longer stay abreast of the world's pace. It has left you, as all of us, in its dust. It is gone, too fleeting, too quick to be grasped or controlled. It moves, simply, faster than you, and because you cannot be anyone else but you, you fail. You are not designed for this pace; you truly are not capable of it. You may seem to be winning for a while, and, sadly, you are encouraged by that. But you should be encouraged only when you are able to sit still and let it pass you by, only when you are comfortable in this fact that you are failing. Slow is the way the body insists on moving, and the body suffers when its demand is not met. Slow is the truth of the current that is your energy. It is not optional. It is, in fact, how you work. Fast is always temporary. It always ends in exhaustion and confusion. It always creates pain. Fast is misaligned so fundamentally that it will never be truly possible for you. And there is no sadness and no loss in this. Slow is happy. Slow is glad. Fail the world, and find some gratitude that you can no longer keep up. It is a mercy killing, the way your silly expectations are extinguished by the fact of this. Those expectations must go. Slow is the way of the body and the way of knowingness. It is wisdom and tenderness. And it is you, thankfully; it is your constitution. Don't wish to be any different. Slow is the best you could hope for."
posted by Caveh Zahedi at
11:51 PM
