The Inconvenience of Slowing Down
In light of the monthly BreakBread prompt, “What makes for a memorable summer?”, I thought a newsletter about “slowing down” would be align.
Slow down you move too fast
You got to make the morning last…
~ Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel
There are times of the year that invite, ask, prod, even beg us to slow down. Are we listening? During the summer it’s the heat and extended daylight.
During the winter it’s the cold and extended darkness. Things speed up in the spring and fall with renewed vitality hopefully nourished by the previous cycles of slowing down.
But for many, the speeding up is familiar and inevitable while the slowing down is rendered optional if not impossible. There’s often a patina of moral dyspepsia that arises at the thought of slowing down, taking time off, resting, not burning our candle at both ends. We recognize the idea of time informed by the rhythms and cycles of the natural world but we abide by the ceaseless movement and restlessness of time as informed by machine.
We forgo being in conversation with the natural world as we pathologize its “inconveniences” as problems to be solved. The heat of summer, and of changing climate is mitigated by all-pervasive air conditioning. The problem of darkness is banished by ubiquitous electric lighting. Could the glow of the omnipresent screen be a panacea burning away some other form of visceral inner darkness lurking on the edges of our awareness?
That’s a topic for another day but screens are an example of us adjusting and adapting to the realm of digital time. A platform of synchronous immediacy everything is “now” except there are a hundred – even a thousand – simultaneous nows all vying for our attention.
This digital now is very different from the long now of waiting for the summer sun to make its way past the sweltering of noon toward an afternoon relief where we can resume activity.
With machine time, time is compressed, standardized, commodified, and monetized. One hour is theoretically the same as the next. This scrubs time clean of all its messy threading between realms of body, earth, and otherworld. The quality of our attention is very different in machine time. Consider a one-hour drive down the interstate at 80 mph versus a one-hour walk through the woods at 3 mph – no screens, earbuds, or electronic paraphernalia! The quality of attention and the presence of mind, body, and soul are different. And while one could argue they don’t necessarily have to be different, it’s simply too seductively convenient and easy for us to unknowingly resign ourselves.
In our conversation work we talk a lot about time. In particular, slowing down. The time dimension in conversation is seldom talked about and not well understood. It’s often ignored and simply disregarded. Why? It’s inconvenient.
David Foster Wallace tells this story:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
The water of conversation is time.
Our animal bodies and minds are astutely tuned to small morsels of time. I recall in the early nineties i was a partner in a record company and one of my business partners was mentoring me in editing video. He shared a rule of thumb he called his “two-frame” rule. When you have a cut between scenes that’s kind of almost there but doesn’t feel quite right, try bumping the cut two frames forward or back. I was amazed at how often it worked and at the marked difference a mere two frames made. Video operates at 30 frames per second so two frames amounts to 1/15 (0.0667) of a second.
Zoom ahead thirty years and think about how we interact with screens aware of how painfully “slow” a website loads even though we’re waiting mere fractions of a second. There’s even a phenomenon called email or screen apnea. First noticed and studied by Linda Stone, she coined this phrase to describe the tendency toward shallow breathing or even holding one’s breath while engaging in email or screen activities. In between the gaps of sending and receiving or doing and waiting the anticipation often induces people to stop breathing for short periods of time - inhaling but not exhaling – or simply not inhaling. This has the effect of amping up stress, anxiety, and fatigue. And they rarely notice they’re doing it.
Why does this matter? It’s not that this is a diatribe against technology but rather an affirmation that we’re wired to respond and react to our environment and environmental cues about time and time is the water in which conversation swims. We talk about slowing down in conversation as a core concept. Of the various practices we teach, the most rudimentary is breathing. This is not some new esoteric practice. Before you speak you normally do take a breath but what we’re inviting is for you to be aware of that breath. In order for bodies to speak, breathing is required. So breathe! And notice that you’re breathing. This is especially powerful in the heat of a conversation where tempers are flaring or you’re feeling cornered and flailing. One deep breath can remind the nervous system that while this may be uncomfortable, this is not truly a life or death situation. That consciously invoked breath may bring enough of a burst of oxygen to keep the brain stem from kicking us into fight or flight mode and give the frontal lobe enough of a pause to regain its footing.
Another core concept under the auspice of slowing down is bringing awareness and balance to the roles of heart, body and mind in conversation. For some, the mind is a given with its rational strategizing as they wallpaper every conversation with all the knowing that they think they know. For them, everything from the neck down is simply a system of transport for the head. For others, their hearts take the lead and are an enigmatic aberration to those who are heads. Slowing down and checking in – body, mind, and heart – is an exercise in bringing more awareness to those parts of us that are indeed in the conversation and where we may not have equal fluency in one or more.
On this moment to moment level we work to become more aware of the language of time and how we move through it. How sometimes we talk fast to the point of tripping over our words, or we space out, opening cognitive gaps where we have no recollection of what was just said. We become more sensitive to how we register pauses and perhaps begin to use pauses and silence as part of our conversational vocabulary, sometimes even asking for a pause mid-conversation to let something linger and bloom. Slowing down during conversation is a powerful method of movement often counterintuitive, misunderstood, or even ignored – especially in a speed-obsessed machine-world. Purposely slowing down is an expansion of time opening it up beyond the exactingly measured linear time moving into the fertile, alive spiraling of organic time. The point of slowing down is freedom – choice. When we expand time we have more opportunity to recognize there might be more options than we initially perceive and to perhaps make different, wiser choices.
In contrasting companionship with the slowing down in conversation is the slowing down of long time. That is, the time in between and around conversations.
It is an arc of conversations over time that nurture relationships and create the narrative of our lives. Think of any long term relationship in your life. While there is always being and doing woven through this relationship the arc of all the conversations you’ve had over time is like a map of how the relationship started, evolved, faltered, and thrived. Understanding this and navigating this long arc conversation by conversation is an art and a gift. We move through and navigate the individual conversation as we would the currents of a sea while the long arc is like the ever cycling tides of a relationship.
The work of BreakBread World takes into account these tides, for it makes a difference in how we abide in a conversation, how we end it, how we leave off when we hold in our view the arc of the relationship and the intentions we hold and the gifts we cherish. We work in the in-between realms of conversations where we have time to relax or harden, ponder or stew, forgive, forget, ruminate, and marinate. Part of our work with conversation is to look at the in-between time along the conversation arc. Like negative space in a piece of art, the in-between seemingly empty space between conversations is where we derive so much of its meaning and how we go about this with our ingrained and learned patterns and habits profoundly impact our relationships.
The act of slowing down is a shift in awareness. A movement of mindfulness and attention. It’s purposely pulling the car over, getting out, and walking through the forest rather than passing by it. It’s a testament to the fact that while we live in a machine-world we are not machines nor will we ever be. Conversation is a human activity that happens at the scale of human pace. One conversation at a time across the arc of a lifetime interwoven with thousands of other lives. Conversation activism starts with a single breath to say i am here, you are here, even though in conversation we may feel our urgency, let us first slow down.