Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

". . .remind us how little time we have; tomorrow Thou hast not given, only today."

-A. Powell Davies

I think we would all agree that the pace of life for most of us has increased exponentially in recent years. The advent of cell phones and e-mail and instant messaging may be hailed by some as time-saving technologies, but personally I find it more and more difficult to put my work away: more and more difficult to separate my home from my workplace, more and more difficult to relax and take the time, as the old saying goes, to simply "smell the roses."

Even ministers, who should know better, have allowed themselves to get caught up into the culture of high speed and busy-ness, and especially the myth of our own indispensability. My colleagues rush to buy all the latest computerized gadgets, while I continue to hold out against owning a cell phone in spite of the convenience it will supposedly bestow. Perhaps I am simply out of step--that is certainly a possibility--I have been out of step before!--but more and more it seems to me almost impossible to escape from the world of work. How available do we have to be? How many hours a week are enough? Is there no rest for the weary or the wicked?

I think this modern dilemma is one of the reasons that I have enjoyed traveling to visit with our Newburyport congregation’s partner church in Transylvania in recent summers. For the time being, at least, the pace of life is still slower there: though the proliferation of satellite discs rising above small, isolated, medieval looking villages and the ubiquity of cell phone technology in a land with little hard wiring augers no good, even in that remote and in some ways still primitive part of the world.

Even in faraway Transylvania, you should know, e-mail and instant messaging and telephones can find you, and they can do so more often and in increasingly more places.

Of late I have come to feel more strongly that many of us here in the United States don’t have enough down time. We are overworked even if we are not underpaid. Most peoples’ vacations are, in my opinion, much too short. The situation is different in, for example, France. Writing in an editorial entitled "French Family Values" in a recent edition of the International Herald Tribune, Paul Krugman writes,

The French family, without question, has lower disposable income. This translates into lower personal consumption: a smaller car, a smaller house, less eating out.

But there are compensations for this lower level of consumption. Because French schools are good across the country, the French family doesn’t have to worry as much about getting its children into a good school district. Nor does the French family, with guaranteed access to excellent health care, have to worry about losing health insurance or being driven into bankruptcy by medical bills.

Perhaps even more important, however, the members of that French family are compensated for their lower income with much more time together. Fully employed French workers average about seven weeks of paid vacation a year. In America, that figure is less than four.

Remember the old Simon and Garfunkel song?

Slow down, you move too fast.
You’ve got to make the mornin’ last.
Just kickin’ down the cobblestones,
Lookin’ for fun, and feelin’ groovy.

I got no deeds to do, no promises to keep
I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep
Let the morningtime drop all its petals on me
Life, I love you, all is groovy!

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days’ worth of rice in my bag,
A bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

A. Powell Davies, the great 20th century Unitarian preacher, warned against our tendency to get too far ahead of ourselves at the expense of the present. He recognized this as a religious issue. He wrote in a little prayer,

O God whom we hope to serve some other time, remind us how little time we have; tomorrow Thou hast not given; only today.

Essayist Annie Dillard writes in Holy the Firm,

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split.

I wake in a god. I wake in arms holding my quilt, holding me as best they can inside my quilt.

We can make a start by paying more attention to the world around us, and by focusing less on the false demands placed upon us by all our wonderful technologies and more upon the beauty that, as the native Americans say, is "above, below, and around us." Poet Mary Oliver makes the point when she writes, "I Walk in the World to Love it." What other reason can there possibly be? What other reason makes any sense?

The great naturalist John Burroughs once wrote,

The longer I live the more my mind dwells upon the beauty and wonder of the world. . . . I have loved the feel of the grass under my feet, and the sound of the running streams by my side. The hum of the wind in the treetops has always been good music to me. . . .

I am in love with this world . . . I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppressions of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.

Despite my feelings of impending cosmic dread, I know that it is not too late to begin paying more attention to the people and things that are most important. I know that the gentle summer breezes will continue to blow for at least a while longer. And I know that I do not have to fully succumb to the world’s false demands and even falser priorities.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, one of the great Hasidic masters of the late 1700s, was for some reason scorned by other rabbis and suffered quite a bit from depression. (I suspect he may have been a victim of cosmic dread in his own time.) In order to help with his problem, he did something which he called "hit-bo-de-dut," a practice of being alone in nature. There, out in the wild, he wrote some of his most beautiful prayers, including this one:

Master of the Universe,
Grant me the ability to be alone;
May it be my custom to go outdoors each day
Among the trees and grass, among all the growing things,
And there may I be alone, and enter into prayer,
To talk with the One I belong to.
May I express there everything in my heart,
And may all the foliage of the field,
All grasses, trees and plants,
May they all awake at my coming,
To send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer,
So that my prayer and speech are made whole
Through the life and spirit of all growing things,
Which are made as one by their transcendent Source.

May you find a way to slow down and enjoy these last days of summer, and to know that you are held and sustained by a power greater than all the technologies yet invented. May you find peace, now, and in the days to come. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock