The Problem with Hurrying

Having been without internet connection this week for a few days has allowed me the freedom to slow down and do other things, like listen to music and read a few things that had been piling up on my desk. . . . There is something about electronic reading, and writing, that tells me unconsciously to hurry up. I am participating in a rapidly moving world where messages require prompt responses and news flashes are updated often. The internet is not a contemplative tool. . . .The truly cultured Chinese, I am told, never hurry to accomplish things since, according to Confucius, things done in haste cannot be done well. I suspect that today's Chinese take this old wisdom with a large dose of MSG. . . .It's no wonder then that hurrying is OK only in Hell; I refer to the advice Virgil gives to Dante in "Inferno": do not spend too much time talking with or looking at the damned souls in Hell. To do so is to pay them respect, so hurrying along with that crowded realm is wise. Speed in the lower depths is also motivated by fear. . . Fear governs the life of so many people in the real world today, including nearly all of my students, who learned early on to be terrified of grades and criticism by teachers. The high school boy I tutor, who is hyperactive, worries excessively about failure and parental criticism, and so turns to me for calming advice. He knows that he can breathe deeply three times and bring himself a modicum of peace, of what I would call mindfulness: being fully present to each assignment he has and doing one at at time, without worrying about the number of upcoming tests or papers due. . . .I find fear and speed everywhere: in the speech patterns of many people I encounter, professional people who talk so rapidly that they slur their words. I am amazed that a few TV anchors, including Anderson Cooper, never seemed to have studied that old-fashioned thing called elocution. I cannot expect people in the media to slow down, but they must be fully intelligible, especially if they are earning millions of dollars a year. . . .All of which brings to me a book recommended by a friend, a book I have not yet located, by the jazz pianist Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery, which has to do with mindfulness. The lesson here, says my friend, is to slow down the body and the mind, be fully in the present, and enjoy (if you are prayerful) what Brother Lawrence, a humble worker in a French monastery kitchen in the 17th century, called the "sacrament of the present moment." Lawrence had little education and found that the formal prayers of the monks were not enough: why not, he thought, find God in the little things of a noisy kitchen, honoring the routine tasks we perform there?.....This reminds me of an article by Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, author of Mindful Eating. She recounts eating a lemon tart and savoring fully the flavor, then getting into conversation and losing touch with what she was eating; finally, returning to the tart, she is able to focus on the smell and flavor and textures in her mouth. She has slowed down the thinking function of the mind so as to access the awareness. Whether she considers this attention prayer, it is, at least for me, closely allied with the idea of the present moment as sacred since it alone is real even in its evanescence. Bays's advice: eat slowly, with long pauses between bites. If you do anything else while eating, even think, the flavor diminishes or disappears. She doesn't mention the obvious: digestion is improved....For me, preparing food can be a meditation practice as I clear my mind of everything except the task before me; and I try to do the same when I eat dinner at home, even though I feel obligated to talk, to avoid feeling that the silence my wife and I experience is awkward or unnatural. A meal, I tell myself, is a social occasion; I cannot be expected to eat like a Trappist or Buddhist monk....And so the challenge goes on in fast-paced world where most of us enjoy human company and find it stimulating while at the same time knowing that there is a time for silence, for slowing down, for eating alone, mindfully. . . .The point is that we have to fight for every opportunity to slow down how we talk, how we eat, how we interact with others, so we can really listen and fully savor the gift of the present moment. ...As I notice the tension of others, the anxiety that tends to rule the world, I catch myself in my own anxious patterns and re-learn the ancient wisdom of slowing down. If all the media and the internet were shut down for a week, I suspect the world would be more peaceful.

How valuable is time?

I am not a patient shopper. My approach--totally opposite of that of most women--is to get the job over quickly. As a result of rushing, I make mistakes, as when this week I bought the wrong type of cheese, failing to see the "jalapeno" listed on the label, or bought green beans that my wife immediately saw, upon their arrival home, as long in the tooth, to use her quaint phrase. And so I had to make a return trip to the store and thus "waste" some time.

I talk and write about the importance of slowing down. I keep reminding myself of the power of the present moment and that the little, ordinary things I do around the house are meaningful, ways of being centered in the reality of the now. Yet in practice quite often, old habits of hurrying persist, perhaps because I live in a fast-paced world.

In a recent article, Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist, reports on some recent research into why we feel pressed for time. Why do people in affluent cities like Tokyo and Toronto walk faster than people in Jakarta and Nairobi? The reason seems to be that, as incomes grow in such cities, time seems increasingly scarce.

It would seem that the fast pace of life is related to an increase in working hours, but apparently this isn't the case: there is very little evidence, says Dunn, that people are working more and relaxing less than in earlier decades.

Rather, the old "time is money" correlation seems to be involved. When time is seen as worth more, as it becomes more valuable, we feel we have less of it. So, according to the researchers, those with more income report feeling more pressed for time. Much of the studies in this area deal with people's perception of the value of their time, even if they are not highly paid individuals.

Dunn mentions that several companies, in an effort to reduce stress and burnout, recommend that employees volunteer some of their time to good causes. Giving away our time to help others is a good way of reducing the impression that our time is incredibly valuable, so valuable that we must rush from one task to the next, bragging about our abilities to multi-task.

Dunn's brief article in Edge focuses on the relation of the way feelings of time pressure have risen in North America to increased incomes. But I wonder about people like me, whose retired income does not increase much, for whom making money is not important. Is my time more valuable because I know at some conscious or unconscious level that I am running out of it?

I enjoy giving my time to others, and I should do more volunteering. For people in my "senior" situation, the value of my time is not related to money at all but to saving my energy and spending what time I have each day doing enriching, fulfilling things, like reminding myself to slow down and savor the present moment.

Never enough time--or patience

When my aged neighbor rings the doorbell, as she routinely does, late in the afternoon when I am napping or in the middle of a project, I know that she will not say much of anything when I answer the door. Growing weary of these interruptions, I began putting a discreet sign on the door: Do Not Disturb.

Since that has had no effect, I recently moved it so it hangs right over the doorbell, so that she could not help but see it. Yesterday, she rang anyway, ignoring all warnings, and I became angry when she offered, as always, no apology. In the past six months of these interruptions, I have been annoyed and whenever possible let my ever-patient wife handle the neighbor, who is more than "out of it," to put it mildly. She is also lonely and wants some human interaction. So I should be sympathetic and smile. Instead, I fume.

I try to put this minor challenge to my sanity in the context of patience, and I wonder if I am growing less and less patient; I also wonder how I can cultivate more patience. Is asking for more patience akin to asking for more time?

Since the two are related, I guess the answer is affirmative: I fear being robbed of my privacy and my time. Maybe I fear my own future dementia, when I will be the one going around the neighborhood ringing doorbells and never apologizing for disturbing the residents.

This neighbor, 85, has something in common with the boy I tutor: they both test my patience.
The boy, who is 15, has ADHD and seldom listens to me and wastes valuable time as a result of my need to repeat. He wants to rush through every assignment when I want him to slow down. He probably will never be a patient person.

All this leads to my wish for myself in this new year: to slow down, be patient, and repeat the words of St. Francis de Sales that are posted on my study wall: "Never be in a hurry. Do everything quietly and in a calm manner. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsover, even if your whole world seems upset."

This should be easy for me, a retired professor who is home most days writing or reading. But old A-type patterns persist, and my brain continues to burst with ideas and reminders of unfinished tasks. It's no wonder I have become a student of silence, a member of the Friends of Silence.

Or that I appreciate articles like that of Pico Iyer in the Sunday NYTimes, "The Joy of Quiet," in which he describes his need to escape the rush of daily life. For most of us, it's a life in which we keep finding more ways to connect and thus produce more stress. At the same time, he says, we keep finding new (or old) ways to disconnect. Often this involves a retreat to a place where the absence of TVs and internet connections and phones is a blessed relief.

He quotes Nicholas Carr: the average American spends eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen (TV or computer), and the number of text messages maddingly increases daily. So for more than 20 years, Iyer has gone to a Benedictine monastery several times a year, not to pray but to be: to lose himself in stillness, to enjoy nature unfettered by noise, to find something akin to happiness.

What he wants is the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens. This is the idea of joy defined by the monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, a fine spiritual writer. As for me, instead of writing about all this, I should be practicing it daily. I don't need to travel to a monastery: I can create a monastic setting of contemplative life in my home, with my patient, literary wife and my ever-silent cat.

I vow to do more of this, become less busy, and maybe as a result less annoyed when my aged neighbor pushes my buttons.

In the Fast Lane

An 83-year-old lady was recently stopped by a traffic cop. "Do you realize you're speeding?" She replied, "Yes, officer, but I had to get there before I forgot where the hell I was going." She got off lightly. (Apparently, if the Internet is to be believed, a true story.)

Most of us, even retirees, seem to be in a hurry. When I was invited to join the Friends of Silence, I immeditately did so. The price was right (free), and the obligations for participating in this online movement non-existent. Even though I have written a lot about silence in the work of Thomas Merton and led retreats on the topic, I find myself preoccupied with busy tasks and need to take time alone to slow down and be silent.

I've written about the Slow Movement, which began in Italy and has spread to areas other than eating, before, and about my love for adagios in music and slowly unfolding movies and novels, and for savoring the present the way our cat, Lizzie, does: with total attention to even the most routine things.

For example, today, as I opened the door for her to go onto the porch, she studied the doorstop with wonderment, as if she had never seen it before. This was, of course, instinctive caution overruling whatever memory she might have had of seeing me, over the past twelve years, do this identical thing. She was concerned that she might not have a way back into the house; the doorstop was her guarantee of an opening.

But what struck me was the way she approaches many of the totally familiar and routine things of her life, as if they are new and amazing. It's like what mystics aim for in their very different searches but what all of us can do if we stop, slow down, and really look at the ordinary things of our lives.

How easy it is to be carried off in memories or daydreams while driving, cooking, or showering instead of consciously noticing the water, the smell of the soap, the feel of the experience, as if for the first time. Mindfulness of this type takes a bit of concentration, but it is rewarding.

I recently glanced at several books at Barnes and Noble, all of them advocating some aspect of mindfulness for stressed people. One by Jan Bays, MD says we can turn the humdrum tasks of our lives into mindful moments that give us a pleasing awareness of an awakened life. You don't have to be a Buddhist to follow this practice, which can easily be applied to Christian or other forms of prayer (Centering prayer, e.g.). To recognize that the kingdom of God is in and around us now requires mindfulness. It has to do with being present to ourselves without criticism, judgment, or analysis--and of our bodies and the world around us so that we feel the presence of God in the present moment.

It usually begins with simply slowly down.

Living Well in the Slow Lane

One of my recurring preoccupations is the need to slow down and savor the fullness of the present moment. I admire what Eckhart Tolle has to say in The Power of Now and other books.

The speed of our culture, of course, makes all the more valuable those moments of solitude and silence where where ordinary time seems to stand still. This is the topic of a few of my recent articles.

Related to this idea--believe it or not--is a seemingly materialistic concern with living a life that is made into a work of art. I admire those friends of ours whose style of dressing, cooking, reading, and other entertainment marks them as discerning individuals who take the time to pay attention to every detail of their lives, from the decoration of their homes to the clothes they wear.

Often, simplicity is best. I recall a 2006 movie about Beau Brummel, hardly a model of spiritual living, yet a man whose pursuit of elegance made him more than a footnote in the history of modern culture.

As portrayed by James Purefoy, Brummel was far from the Oscar Wilde type of effeminized dandy; in fact, he revolted against the perfumed, powdered, colorful extravagance of the late 18th century fop, preferring instead understated, fitted clothes, dark suits with trousers, and a cravat--precursors of the modern man's suit with tie.

Unlike many is his time, Brummel was fastidious about his cleanliness, bathing every day (a novelty at the time), shaving every day, and spending much of his inherited fortune on clothes and the perfect maintenance of his outfits. It reportedly took him five hours to dress, and his friends, called (by Lord Byron) the Dandy Club, would come to watch him get dressed. (The dandy always needs an audience.)

Alas, his expenditures and gambling debts forced him to leave England in 1816 and live out his days in France in penury and madness. But before this sad end, B.B. devoted himself to one cause: taking pride in all that he did, including his conversation. He altered the concept of the gentleman, which became a paramount issue in the 19th century, as the emphasis shifted from inherited wealth to men who tried to revive some of the old chivalric ideals of honor with social accomplishments, the result of their own efforts.

Although Beau Brummel became one of the first men to be famous for being famous, accomplishing little more (some said) than being a witty clothes-horse, he helped advance the idea of a gentleman as one who takes great pains to do whatever he does well, with panache, and with that air of feigned indifference the Italians (following Castiglione) call sprezzatura. This cultivated nonchalance is the product of education, reading, imagination, good company, money, and attention to detail; and it is, I suggest, a hallmark of being civilized.

What bearing the dandy (in the true sense embodied in the life of Brummel) has on our culture with its great informality seems to be minimal; yet I like to think that the old idea (again from Castiglione) of making one's life into a work of art is still possible. It has something to do with paying attention to the everyday, making the ordinary things around us (food, clothes, furniture) into reminders of beauty and of the importance of caring passionately about getting the details right.

There is a reminder here, I think, of living fully in the present and enjoying what life offers, of valuing simplicity and the natural; so I can see the spiritual dimension of the slow movement in Italy and elsewhere, which has to do with caring enough to live well.

Wanted: an elderly, relaxed sloth

The main character in the 1983 German novel The Discovery of Slowness is described as an elderly sloth after a long massage and a pipe of opium--a wonderful image from Sarah Bakewell's book on Montaigne.

Montaigne, the 16th century French writer, retired at 37 to a tower in his chateau to write, to observe, to slow down and look. He found a much-needed kind of wisdom and moderation that contrasted with the turmoil of his times; he did so by writing his essays.

Bakewell suggests that Montaigne would be a good model for today's Slowness Movement, inspired by the 1983 German novel and centered in Italy, found today in many places, in many publications, not just as a reaction against fast food but as a reminder to live fully in the present. This is a type of spirituality for our times, though not often called such, a needed response to the hectic pace of lives measured by megabytes and iPods, where the slow pace of a massaged sloth is the last thing anyone would admire.

One key result of slowing down, or perhaps a concomitant part of it, is the ability to pay attention to each aspect of daily life, something that Montaigne mastered. Nothing escaped his gaze or his pen. He writes in a memorable passage taken from Bakewell's biography, How to Live:

"If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves,
as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Getting rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off--though I don't know."

Note the typical note of skepticism at the end and the humility as the author honestly examines his life. What results are not quick and glib insights, as we are likely to find on blogs (not this one!) today but a mellow kind of wisdom.

As Virigina Woolf, one of Montaigne's many admirers, said, he attained happiness by analyzing the details of his life and gave coherence to all that make up the soul.

So Montaigne is a model of what so many seekers are talking about now, as they have in the centuries past: mindfulness. Paying attention to the fullness of the present moment before it is gone, savoring it slowly--even though the human impulse is to hurry. And finding a bit of happiness in the process.

I can envision signs on the highway: Slow down and live: the life you save may be your own. But Flannery O'Connor already thought of that.