Slow down—those weren’t the instructions I was looking for. “How much slower can we go…?” I wondered, and entering our fourth winter of forced curtailment, you can hardly blame me. But what I didn’t know, didn’t realize, is that the length of the list of your social engagements is not the only way to gauge a busy life or frantic mind. These things can also be measured in minutes on your phone, dollars in online purchases, scrambling to keep up on news, on people, on homework assignments. Sometimes they’re marked by the number of prayers over what you’re worried about… rather than all you are thankful for. Anxious energy bursting from every thought and glance. So much to think and do. I’ve become an expert at socially-distant hustle. Slow down.
Not that we always have the luxury of putting life on hold, or the forced annoyance of doing so, either. When the mandate comes, we balk: Slow down. I can’t, but I am. Because my thoughts are murky and my energy levels are shot and my symptoms are contagious. Weird things keep floating to the surface of this frozen lake of time… Humidifier mist curling in and out of bright light filtering through the blinds at 1 pm. The vibrant red of the new Christmas pajamas I’ve been wearing for two days straight. My daughter’s eyelashes brushing my cheek when I give her a hug—the only physical contact I’ve allowed myself with another human for over a week (because she’s sick, too). The healing music of her giggle from behind a chair. Voices floating in from other rooms—sometimes cheerful, sometimes stern, often just living. Color and contrast outside have faded now, and somehow the drab lifelessness of it feels cozy. Why do these things matter? I don’t know; but they do. Maybe because they’re all that exists in this moment. Maybe because they’re pure.
I read the sincere words of a dying woman, today, and they pierced my heart like living poetry—the simple, essential essence of life. And more than anything, those words, her observations, her art, testified that some things are more important than others, & it’s most often the stuff you take for granted or miss. The stuff you have to feel & see & know. Simple, simply, life. Slow down.
