There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living. There is nothing that is harder to learn.
- Seneca
The volume of work divided by time on our hands equals velocity. If our work keeps growing, but the time available stays the same or decreases, it increases the speed at which we have to work. Our culture pulls us into this orbit of speed. Speed gets noticed. Speed is praised by others. Speed makes us feel self-important.
But this acceleration is detrimental, as not everything in life is moving at the same pace as we are, and the faster we go the harder it becomes to stop. In the ensuing exhaustion, we lash ourselves for not finding work-life balance, for our inability to hold the competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated and meaningful way.
In his 2001 book, Crossing the Unknown Sea, poet David Whyte speaks to the problem with speed:
“The great tragedy of speed as an answer to the complexities and responsibilities of existence is that very soon, we cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity as we are. We see only those moving in the same whirling orbit and only those moving with the same urgency. Soon we begin to suffer a form of amnesia, caused by the blurred vision of velocity itself, where those germane to our humanity are dropped from our minds one by one. We start to lose sight of any colleagues who are moving at a slower pace, and we start to lose sight of the bigger, slower cycles that underlie our work. We especially lose sight of the big, unfolding wave form passing through our lives that is indicative of our central character.
On the personal side, as slaves to speed, we start to lose sight of family members, especially children, or those who are ill or infirm, who are not flying through the world as quickly and determinedly as we are. Just as seriously, we begin to leave behind the parts of our own selves that limp a little, the vulnerabilities that actually give us color and character. We forget that our sanity is dependent on a relationship with longer, more patient cycles extending beyond the urgencies and madness of the office.
A friend falls sick, and in that busyness, we find their interruption of our frantic lives frustrating and distracting. On the surface we extend our sympathies, but underneath we are already moving in a direction that takes us far away. We flee the situation even if we are sending flowers every day; we rejoin, thankfully, the world that is on the go, on the move, untouched by mortality.
Once we ourselves are touched by that mortality, however, through whatever agency it arrives in our lives a broken limb, the loss of a loved one, the collapse of our business, a moment of humiliation in the doorway of a meeting room our identities built on speed almost immediately fall apart and disintegrate. We find ourselves suddenly alone and friendless, strangers even to ourselves.
When it becomes all-consuming, speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. Speed is a sure sign that we are living someone else’s life and doing someone else’s work. But speed saves us the pain of all that stopping.”
There is no hurry, and in a way, there is no future. It is all here—so take it easy, take your time, and get acquainted with it.
-Alan Watts
