Lessons in Slowing Down
Because it’s hard to care when we’re always rushing
“…If
you think fall is made
of dying, you are wrong, it
is made up of the future.”
~Victoria Chang
As we come to the other side of Thanksgiving, the many different relationships people have to this season are always acutely on my mind. Below is an excerpt from the note I sent at this time last year, which still feels like the right message to share today.
"I hope that, if this is a holiday that offers you an opportunity to sink into a feeling of safety, acceptance, and warmth, you are both nourished and renewed in your commitment to foster that feeling for others. If, on the other hand, it is a time that requires you to make difficult personal decisions or to steel yourself in some way, I hope that you’ve found a path through and that you can be nourished now by returning to people and places that offer you safety and belonging. And, if this is a time that is marked more by loss than by bounty, I offer you a reminder that we are always less alone in this feeling than we realize."
With all this in mind, I’m sending a different sort of note this week—a simple reminder to find ways to breathe in and reorient, whatever these days and the weeks ahead might mean for you and for those around you.
I’m in the midst of writing a note that I hope to share with you next week. Right now it’s not quite ready and, as I was attempting to finish it today, I decided that sometimes our thoughts need some extra room to coalesce. So I’m going to give my mind a little more time and space this week.
My routines have shifted quite a bit over the past few months, and one basic consequence is that I find it harder to create space to think these days. I spend less time walking through the park and more time on buses and subways. Reminders and alerts ping and vibrate more often in my day-to-day patterns. And, as a result, I sometimes find that my thoughts are more truncated and disconnected. I suspect this is also a time of year when that’s common for many people, as the days grow shorter and obligations pile up.
Many years ago Fred Rogers was asked to reflect on the people who had made a difference in his life, and his response—which was characteristic of a man whose career was largely defined by a desire to slow the pace of the world down for children—is on my mind today. Considering those who had influenced him most, he said,
“A lot of people who have allowed me to have some silence. And I don’t think we give that gift very much anymore. I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence. How do we do that? In our business, yours and mine, how do we encourage reflection?”
That was more than thirty years ago, and I’m sure he would be dismayed by how much more hurried and information-obsessed we’ve become. I worry sometimes, as I think Mr. Rogers did, about how our reverence for being hurried, for hustling, for checking a million boxes, for constantly striving and achieving disconnects us from reflection and, by extension, from our capacity for empathy. I worry, too, about what children learn from watching us forever harried and stretched too thin. It is more difficult, neurologically, to show care when we’re in a rush, which means it is also more difficult to model care. So, what happens when we’re all constantly in a rush? Or when it’s so hard for many people to meet their basic needs that they have no choice but to live in a perpetual full-court press just to get by?
The basic premise of Notes on Hope is to write toward staying tender and brave in the midst of so much that often makes both of those qualities hard to keep at the center. Tonight, I’m going to do that by slowing down and allowing for some silence. I hope you’ll take this as a gentle nudge to carve out some time to do the same if you can. It might only be possible to do so for a few moments. That’s often the case for me too, so I get it. I also hope that if you are in a position to give someone else the gift of a little silence and extra room to breathe, you will do that for them.
Wishing you the space to let your mind wander and the care to offer that space to others,
Alicia
A few things I found helpful and hopeful this week…
- The Claims of Close Reading, a beautiful love letter to teaching, literature, and the power of equitable access to both by Johanna Winant
- Girls Heal Trauma with Horses how an equine therapy program in rural Indiana helps girls and wild mustangs learn to trust by Ashley Ford
- Why Children's Books Matter, children’s fiction has the power to suggest an alternative way of being by Penelope Lively
- What's Helping Today, a really generous and vulnerable exchange of letters about getting through these difficult times, particularly for those being targeted and sacrificed, from Sandy Allen's newsletter
