Exposing my fragility saved me from breaking
Speed. Efficiency. Multi-tasking. A race against the clock.
These are the concepts that defined my early life, always feeling one step behind the continually ticking second hand. Class in the morning, a flight home from Europe, my best friend’s birthday — I slid in just in time, packing more discrete moments into each preceding minute.
We all have a set amount of hours in this life, but not everyone makes the same use of each hour.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” was the cocky motto of my childhood.
Not surprisingly, I felt myself going further quicker: hitting the right marks for the best schools, or working at peak job performance to squeeze in a daily side hustle.
But the once inspirational line “move fast and break things” turned instead into an unavoidable natural law:
“move fast, you’ll break things.”
Drinking glasses shattered as I cleared the dinner table while hopping on the phone. Bags of flour wasted as they catapulted onto the floor from carrying too many things at once. And relationships dwindled when care was measured more in outputs than inputs.
I was always well acquainted with fragility in life, but never respectful of it until a virus-induced quarantine arrived at my front door, as it arrived at foot of many.
The fragility of normalcy inspires a sort of awe:
the kind of wonder one experiences when witnessing the stars, or the birth of a child, or the passing of the seasons.
It’s a breathtaking acknowledgement that the things we everyday presume as true are in fact as illusory as the body of water, separating into liquid as we attempt to hold it still.
For once, I felt eons ahead of the second hand.
March 18th, 19, 20th, each as if a month unto themselves.
Neighborhood business shuttered, offices closed, and friends were fired or furloughed. All because life came to a standstill, our pace of striving and growth contracting under the weight of stillness.
So stillness seems to be the true quality of being.
So it is appropriate that in an effort to slow the spread of that which ends life, we all can find some sort of healing in slowness.
An hour and a half for yoga overtaking a timeboxed ten minute meditation. Spending (not wasting) an afternoon writing letters to loved ones, musing on the eccentricities of a chickadee from my morning walk. Hummus-making by hand, watching the steady boil as the timer ticked on.
With space (not boredom) came the fertile ground for artistry. The patience to paint one canvas over five days. A true respect for the delicacy of each brush stroke and the appreciation of everything that already is.
Even if change coming fast can feel disorienting, it gives us a glimpse at the regeneration that’s possible by approaching it slowly: in our economy, in our society, in our own health.
Efficiency may be in opposition to resiliency, but life itself is a dynamic, evolving interplay between the two… and we can thrive in that balance.
