Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

A meditation on adopting patience

Photo by Yegor Denisov on Unsplash

Several weeks ago I was surprised to notice myself driving slowly and enjoying it immensely. It is amazing how much more I see when I’m cruising down city streets at or just under the posted speed limit. People out walking. Bikers out biking. Scooters out scooting. Kids playing in their yards. Houses with architectural details I never noticed.  Other drivers whizzing past in a reckless dash to get somewhere a minute sooner, as if it mattered.

True confession: Part of my inspiration for slower driving is to avoid the speed cameras that valiantly attempt to enhance safety and the city treasury. But I think another genuine motivator is age. I don’t have much reason anymore to be in such an all-fired hurry. I can afford to take my time and enjoy the journey.

Of course I do remember, back when I was a young driver, how nothing was as irritating being stuck behind Ma and Pa Kettle as they merrily toddled along at speeds approaching 15 miles per hour. But that was different. They were driving like geezers. I like to think that what I do is a driving meditation.

Meditate on This

I have practiced meditation daily for the past ten years, and I still don’t know if I’m doing it right. According to the teachers and the texts, here’s how it’s supposed to happen: You sit, focusing on the breath going in and out, and become mindful of thoughts as they float by – observing them, but not becoming attached to them – and then gently refocus attention on the breath. This is called mindfulness meditation. But here is what happens when I meditate: I sit, focus on my breathing, and in a few minutes my mind goes totally blank – no thoughts, no visuals, no nothing. I believe the technical term for this experience is mindlessness meditation.

Most days I also nap, or as I call it, horizontal meditation. It works about the same: mind goes blank and 20 minutes later I pop up, feeling refreshed.   

Maybe I have missed the whole point of meditating. Maybe I am achieving the goal and don’t know it. Maybe I am catching up on my sleep. I really don’t know. But I doggedly keep at it every day, in case it’s helping me and I don’t realize it. I once asked my teacher how I would know if meditation was working. His answer was “when other people notice something different about you.” But people have been noticing something different about me my whole life, so that’s not so helpful.

Or maybe the way to gauge the effectiveness of meditation is by what doesn’t happen. For instance, I do 40 sit-ups every morning and nothing happens, but whenever I have stopped doing them, I can count on lower back spasms that mean several days of pain, if I am lucky, or two days flat on my back, if I am not.  So here is what does not happen when I meditate:  When a friend tells me the worst thing ever has just happened and her life is over for all practical purposes and the whole of Western civilization is crumbling, I do not panic. I take a breath, smile, and say, “Why don’t we take a closer look at this?” So maybe meditation should get the credit.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that as I get older, I find myself becoming more patient – with others, and with myself.

What’s Your Hurry?

As someone who chose to be a journalist, a profession built around deadlines, it’s liberating yet strange to find that deadlines no longer rule my life. I meet two self-imposed deadlines each week to push out the content out for this newsletter and podcast. That’s two per week, versus years of two or more deadlines per day in the past. Aside from those minimum milestones, my time is mostly my own. So I can afford to be patient. I can afford to be in no particular hurry. I’m not trying to cram a boatload of experiences or accomplishments into my daily dithering.

Whenever I feel the stirrings of deadline-driven anxiety fermenting in my gut, I tamp them down with my own, hand-crafted meditation, which can be applied in any situation from a major marital disagreement to losing a prime parking space:

Will it matter in a year? Will it matter in 100 years? Will it matter in 1,000 years? And given that I am merely one of 7 billion humans on one planet circling one star in a universe of not less than 30 billion trillion stars, how much can it possibly matter?

So if you happen to find yourself behind a dark blue Prius that refuses to exceed the speed limit, here are your choices: You can honk repeatedly, you can swerve around me, or you can ask yourself, “Why am I in such a damned hurry? Why don’t I just relax and enjoy the journey?”

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.