“The more you slow down, the more life starts to make sense,” Uriel Maksumov.  The ability to slow down is predicated on trust.  We slow down when we feel secure and safe enough to halt the rushing whether it is physically or mentally and that feeling of security comes when we trust our surroundings or our ability to navigate through whatever comes our way.  The more I dive into various aspects of my 9-5 as well as my personal work, I realize how crowded the mind becomes even when we have the best of intentions.  As we are in holiday mode from now until the New Year, there’s an additional layer of pressure and busy-ness on top of all the usual clutter and movement.  The truth is we can’t make sound decisions if we are navigating at top speed 24/7.  Cars aren’t designed to make a 90 degree turn at 80 miles an hour nor are they meant to do 30 miles an hour on the highway and we certainly can’t drive multiple cars at the same time—in any scenario someone is likely to end up very hurt.  We need to know how to maneuver each situation safely and we need to find the pace that either keeps up with traffic or that we can sustain and we certainly need to focus on the conditions in front of us.  It’s the same for our minds.

We are behind the wheel at all times when it comes to our minds and, like driving a car, we need determine the route we take and the speed and what we pay attention to.  We know we’re supposed to drive with hands-free devices and pay attention to the road yet people are behind the wheel with a phone in their hands responding to text messages while on a call and trying to hear the navigation while the radio is playing a crappy song so we’re trying to change the station/channel.  Just reading that back it sounds ridiculous yet this is how we operate EVERY DAY.  Driving 80 miles an hour (or more, be honest) while doing all these things at once.  We can praise our ability to muti-task all we want but at some point that isn’t sustainable and it is NEVER safe—PSA: STOP DOING THAT CRAP ON THE ROAD.  Just as we can make the choice to pay attention to the road, we can navigate our thoughts as well.  Our minds operating at top speed seem pretty good but unrestrained thoughts will simply fly through familiar neural pathways and the same old junk will repeat and continue to bring us to the same places with the same results over and over again.  In that regard it isn’t just feeling safe to slow down, sometimes we have to slow down TO be safe.

We’ve made busy-ness and distraction our safety net.  If we’re in constant motion we aren’t addressing anything beneath the need for activity—that root of pain or sadness is always there and will continue to fuel the need for distraction.  We keep up with the distraction for so long we either forget the root or why the root even bothered us and the speed becomes the new norm and we forget how to slow down.  Until we hit a wall and we either start burning the tires out or we simply are so exhausted we can’t start again.  When we’re young, we think we can handle it all—and the truth is we can process a greater variety of things at once when we’re younger.  But the more we push through life and take on new roles and responsibilities, we start to feel the sludge build up, the load is heavier and the transitions aren’t as smooth as they used to be.  We need to slow down so we can see the finer details and fully understand what we’re seeing and what we need to do.  It’s at that point we realize that the security and safety we feel comes from knowing what to do rather than how much we do.  Sure we can equate this to stopping and smelling the roses to see the richness of life—but it’s also about recognizing we brought ourselves to those flowers for a purpose in the first place.  We brought ourselves to a place where we could find peace and safety.  We learned that life comes at us at the pace we make it and we need to slow down to take in the richness it has to offer.