Applying the Brakes

When we’re young, we want to accelerate.

“When I get older/grow up/graduate, I will do…”

We’re looking forward.

Rushing.

Achieving.

Setting goals and knocking them down at a rapid pace.

When you’re 20, a year is 5% of your life.

But when you’re 50, a year is 2% of your life.

You don’t need to rush because TIME is rushing by you, at an ever increasing pace.

You need to slow down.

More accurately said, you WANT to slow down.

Because, deep down, you know that, as Milan Kundera wrote in Slowness

"There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting."

As you get older, you want to savor more because you kind of know that your days of savoring anything are slowly winding down.

You want to figure out how to apply the brakes.

You can’t stop it. You wouldn’t want to, but you can slow it down.

Things like prayer, meditation, and yoga do that for me. For others, it may be poetry or art.

But finding activities that, within their fabric, help one apply the brakes.

That seems like a worthwhile course to chart.