Choose your Speed
- Author:
David Gunston
The pace of modern life is often cited as a contributory factor in mental illhealth although this is difficult to substantiate clinically. Nevertheless, choosing the speed at which to live our lives and being able to vary the speed at will is an important quality for social survival and a sense of proportion.
In his book Adventures in Solitude, David Grayson says: ‘Many times in my life I have repeated Rodin’s saying that “slowness is beauty”. To read slowly, to feel slowly and deeply; what enrichment! In the past I Syndication International have been so often greedy. I have gobbled down books?I have gobbled down work?I have even gobbled down my friends!?and indeed had a kind of enjoyment of all of them. But rarely have I tasted the last flavour of anything, the final exquisite sense of personality of spirit that secretes itself in every work that merits serious attention, in every human being at all worth knowing.’
In other words, he did not regulate the speed of his life correctly. Psychologists nowadays are constantly telling us that many of our misfortunes are simply due to bad timing, advising us to pick our moments?for effort, decision-making, seizing opportunity, even enjoyment and giving pleasure to others. But they say very little about either the correct speed for picking the right time, and even more importantly, the tempo of subsequent action.
Ninety per cent of the art of driving a motor car is judging the correct speed to proceed, having regard to all the road and traffic conditions prevailing at any given, constantly changing moment. In a journey of only a mile or two, that may mean a dozen or more adjustments of speed, according to circumstances. Life is like that, too. It demands a constantly changing tempo, a keen balance between too little and too much, a sure knowledge of just when to apply throttle or brake.
Too often, though, our driving speed of life is reckless, uncontrolled, erratic and whimsical, sluggish and feverish by turns and governed more by moods or the main chance than by the prevailing conditions along the road we have to travel. For the road conditions in life change just as often as do those of the highway, and we ignore them at our peril.
How easily we get our sense of values distorted, our aims confused, our perspectives exaggerated or twisted! The things we regard as power are all too often weakness. The things we so readily regard as weak prove in the end to have inner strengths. Even the people we have to live with prove in the end to be very different when we manage to penetrate their surface assurance, poise and seeming success to find underneath the scars of failure and sufferings that they have endured.
Frequently we tend to rush enthusiastically, even ecstatically up self-chosen paths from which we then have to turn back late, often very late in the day. Once again the speed was wrong; deliberation would have been wiser and less wasteful.
At other times we ‘keep our cool’, as we think, when others more correctly see our attitude as sheer lethargy, or indifference. Some opportunity or need presents itself; and we think subconsciously ‘tomorrow is another day’. When our tempo of life needed swift and sudden impetus, we failed to respond.
These failures to choose the correct speed, and we all know them far more than we are prepared to accept, are ultimately frustrating, exhausting, even totally destructive of life itself. Constant hurrying is a modern intemperance that kills in the end: too many people today are hurrying and worrying beyond human endurance. As Robert Raynolds points out: ‘Many of our painful frustrations are caused by our Athlete David Bedford choosing his speed ?in this case faster than anyone else on the track.
driving desire to make an end of something or other. We work ourselves to death trying to make an end of unfinished business. We are in a kind of cold rage to bring about a desired end in our own time and by our own means. Eternity must laugh at our pretences. To be driven by a passion to hurry to end is to famish our lives of a living present’.
Yet, common though this fault is, there are times when speed makes all the difference. Procrastination is often a vice, opportunities are frequently fleeting and must be seized, swiftness of reaction or decision is sometimes vital for victory in what we seek to do. Similarly, some people deliberately reduce their tempo of life way beyond ordinary relaxation, slowing up mentally as much as physically in a kind of opting-out process designed (always unsuccessfully, of course) to bring inner peace. The so-called human ‘cabbage’, mindless, apathetic, indifferent, lifewasting and totally devoid of inspiration to others, especially the young, is very often another example of the wrong choice of life speed.
Yet again, slowness can be a great blessing. An hour with nothing to do can be an enriching experience if we consciously switch off the engine, set the hand-brake and ‘recharge our batteries’ by complete relaxation, taking a walk in the country, taking time out from the racecourse of life in meditation, study or even one of the more rewarding forms of idling. As Pascal pointed out: ‘Most of the evils of life arise from man’s being unable to sit still in a room’. And Henry David Thoreau viewed it this way: ‘When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality’. Too often, to continue the motoring metaphor, we drive fast with the brake on, thereby setting up tensions that can easily burn up our nervous and physical energy, impair our skills and dull our performance in life.
So often we need to save ourselves from our hectic concern over trifles, our insistent self-immersion in pettiness and fussiness, our foolhardy giving of strength to the unimportant, our pursuit of short horizons that block from our view the eternal perspectives.
The best way to start is to seek to acquire an inner balancing mechanism, a kind of mental and spiritual speedometer that controls our life tempo exactly right according to each new situation we have to face. This is really just another definition of the ‘true goal of the considered life’, peace of mind.
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