“Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” --Mae West
You have no record of my prescription!! I thought to myself, did not say out loud, thank God.
That happened this week after standing in a twenty-minute-long line at my local chain drugstore, waiting to pick up a solution I was supposed to drink to…well, let’s say help evacuate my innards…so, the last thing I wanted to hear on this day before a lovely hospital procedure was that things were not clockwise lined up. Not ready to go. Not happening now. Not on my schedule. Not timely. Not on the dot.
I called the doctor’s office in a righteous huff. The administrator quickly apologized. The doc was so busy with caring for other patients, he’d missed signing off on the script. My ego and my anger deflated quickly. And I thought, “Why am I such a jerk sometimes when things don’t happen in my time and on time and fast?”
Like when I am standing in line at the grocery store or stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike or waiting on hold with my airline or twiddling my thumbs when an appointment is late or even a no show. So many times, when these normal hiccups in life happen, I get miffed. Annoyed. Hassled. Fuming. Convinced that if the world only went at the speed I demand, things would be so much better.
Which isn’t really true. The reality is that almost all of the time when I am stressed because of the clock or when I am rushing to get from here to there or when I am impatient with another person because they are too slow for me, I buy into one worldly myth.
Faster is always better. Faster.
As in faster internet speed or faster driving for our commute or faster service at a restaurant or faster answers to a late-night email or text or faster attention at the doctor’s office. Always it feels like our frenetic culture demands that things speed up, no turning back or dialing it down. Fast food. Fast home grocery delivery and fast ordering on Amazon. Who has time to go to the store? We overpack our schedules and see weekends and holidays as times not to slow down but in fact to try and do even more and faster.
One winter I was in such a rush to get to work that twice in one week I zoomed out my front door onto an icy February walkway, slipped and fell in a dramatic upward arc and then landed in a heap on my back. Coffee flying one way. Briefcase tumbling the other. Me staring up at the sky, wondering if I broke my tail bone. I asked my spiritual director what he thought it might mean. He said the obvious I was blind to.
“Maybe God is telling you to just slow down, John.”
Yup. Yet how rarely do I slow down. I forget that the things I do well and really enjoy in this life, the activities and relationships that bring me meaning, these always involve taking my time. Being thoughtful. Paying attention. Pacing myself. Not being such an impatient self-important jerk.
Good sermons and good writing take time, many hours, can’t just be instantly ordered up on CHATGPT. Prayer is not like a hundred-yard dash. I have to sit in the quiet and be still and listen. When I’m with loved ones, like Bridget who I play catch with when I visit her out in Minnesota, if I rushed this beautiful ritual, it would ruin it. My woodworking in the basement? My baking bread, trying out a new recipe? My counseling the people I serve?
I have to slow down, slow down, slow down.
Soon I’m taking my yearly writing retreat at a Benedictine college in central Minnesota, nestled among the plains and the lakes of that bucolic place. I’ll stay in a spartan one bedroom apartment for ten days. I’ll write. Ride my bike. Talk to God. Rest and sleep. Visit old friends. Most importantly, I will turn off my email, leave the calendar back home, shut off the news, and jump off the treadmill that is life for too many of us in 2023.
I know I’m lucky. I am so grateful to be able to do this. I so wish that more of us would find creative ways and time to just chill. Stop rushing. Why do we believe that if only we go fast enough, well then, then we’ll absolutely be a good parent, a good worker, or a good child of God? That’s the devilish spirit of the world trying to trick us into believing fast is always good and slow is always bad.
Perhaps we should take a cue from the Almighty. Even God rested and slowed down after a long week. God worked six days to bring forth Creation. But as Genesis tells us, “On the sixth day God finished the work that [God] had done, and…rested on the seventh day…. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work of creation.”
Even the Creator slows down sometimes. That’s wise spiritual advice for us. We are just human creatures made by God to enjoy this miracle called life.
And slowly. Slowly.
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