I checked my email that afternoon. That was my first mistake.
What I found waiting for me was one of THOSE emails. One of those emails criticizing me for work I’d done. It wasn’t scathing criticism, to be sure, but it doesn’t need to be, does it? What the email said was just enough to… well… agitate me.
My inward reaction was predictable. And predictably petty. The usual combination of pride and perplexity and anger. But I realized in that moment, it was more than those things. It wasn’t just feeling insulted and angry and all the rest. It’s also that I felt rushed. Perhaps you can relate. (No doubt you’ve gotten those emails too.) There welled up within me a sense of haste, a desire to hurry up and analyze the email and reply to it and fix the situation and fix it fast and make it go away. Preferably within the hour. My mind went from zero to sixty. Then sixty-five. I was already crafting the reply in my head before I’d even finished reading the email.
And that’s when I realized just how much I needed to slowww… dowwwn. I thought, I can’t go on like this. I can’t go through life as somebody who’s rushed like this in response to every stimulus. Strange as it may sound, I found it helpful to imagine the writer of that email speaking his words to me in slow motion—and underwater too!—because it felt like this calmed and quieted the hasty frenzy of it all, and put things in perspective.
And then I began to realize, this isn’t just a matter of emails and my responses to them. It’s deeper and wider than that. I’ve realized I need to slow down the way I relate to the world around me, including but not limited to the feedback I get from others about my performances.
You know those commercials where one person is walking at normal pace, or in slow motion, down a crowded city sidewalk, and everyone else is hustling by at super-fast time-lapse speed? Lately I’ve been thinking, Yeah, I want to be that guy. I want to be the guy who’s moving slowly even if life is swirling quickly around him. I want to nurture an inward sense of pace and patience that isn’t dictated by the tempo around me—and for that matter, by the tempo of my own outward activity.
I’ve made it my new campaign. And I do think it’s working. At least a little. It’s become something I tell myself regularly throughout the day. “Slow… down.” I’ve even made an effort to move that way physically, because the way I function in my body impacts the way I think and feel. Walking, turning, gesturing, reaching, eating, drinking, patiently. There are times when I’ll stop halfway down the steps just to breathe, and size up the moment, before I keep going. Maybe that sounds gimmicky, but right now I’m happy to make use of gimmicks to make headway.
So I’m loving April of 2021, the month when I finally learned (or started to learn) to slow things down. Can I keep it up? I guess we’ll see in May. But I’m in no hurry.