Why We Should Let Our Lives Slow Down

Nowadays, we have more convenience than ever before.  We can send text messages faster than making phone calls, e-mail much faster than snail mail, and even have food delivered from restaurants within a mile rather than go out for it.  In other words, we live in an age of convenience.  Our culture is also very impatient—for example, I remember a commercial that very deliberately used a background song with the lyrics, “I want it all.  And I want it now.”  Convenience can be a gateway to great things, one obvious example being that we don’t have to toil in the sun all day long to eat like our ancestors did.  But, in enjoying the speeding up of life, there is also the danger of taking it too far.

Convenient at a Price

As higher speed becomes more widespread it becomes expected of more and more people, thus gadgets like smartphones are considered less a personal choice and more a necessity.  People are expected to check their personal emails and social media pages not just once in a while, but every day.  In essence, since these things are for most of us purely leisure rather than work, then not only are the less pleasant aspects of life meant to be sped up, but leisure has become fast as well.  

That seems like it would make sense.  Since we live in a time with new things and innovations, new ways of having fun is a relatively natural progression from new ways of working.  However, based on my experience, I would say that as leisure specifically becomes faster and faster, it also loses some of its purposes.  Leisure is meant at its heart to be a time of slowing down and relaxing.  If against this, we let our leisure time be contaminated with extreme freneticism, we can no longer slow down and relax at all.  

We might think of impatience as a sin against patience.  More than a simple venial sin, though, impatience can negatively impact all aspects of our lives by depriving us of the leisure God intended us to have.  

There’s nothing inherently wrong with carving out a time slot for such modern conveniences as personal email.  The problem comes when someone—even everyone—feels like he must answer all his personal emails right away, or risk angering people.  If we allow the need for speed to rule every aspect of our lives, it becomes in some sense a false god we must reject (e.g. “Hurry up through this Mass.  I have things to do.”) but it also deprives our lives of some of their meaning.

Focus Our Priorities

Though I’m not a trained theologian, I would say that God did not give us lives on earth just so we could rush through every moment.  Rather, our earthly lives are part of who we are meant to be.  God had a reason when He put us on earth to live out our lives gradually in time.  Again, it’s not inherently wrong to want one thing, particularly something unpleasant, to be over, but there is a problem when we rush through life so much that we want everything to be over.  

When I was a child I enjoyed watching a show called Adventures From the Book of Virtues, which, as the name suggests, illustrated the importance of various virtues to children through stories.  The story emphasizing patience was called The Magic Thread, about a boy named Peter who wanted to skip past normal childhood unpleasantness.  He was given a ball with a magic thread, the thread being his life, with the caution that “Once you pull the thread out, it can’t go back in.”  First, after pulling it to get out of a test, he wanted to be older, so he began to pull it more.  This pulling of the thread continued until he got married and decided he would never pull it again.  But, life got hard and he pulled it to the point that he was pulling constantly, during the good times as well as the bad.  Finally, he became an old man with no memories of the life he skipped and everyone he loved was dead.  Thankfully, he was able to smash the magic ball and return to boyhood, at last content to wait for the next stage of life to come in its own good time.  How unfortunate that many adults have never learned Peter’s lesson.

Conversely, there is the classic Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle.”  The song is told from the first-person perspective of a businessman.  For the first two verses, he is aware of his young son who idolizes him and wants to spend time with his dad, but the father thinks himself much too busy.  Then, in the last two verses, his son has grown up but their roles are reversed.  The song ends, “And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he’d grown up just like me.  My boy was just like me.”  This lesson is told a little differently, in that the father and son did not so much detest the idea of familial time, but they got so used to filling their lives with other obligations that they essentially rejected a healthy relationship until it was too late.

As these two stories illustrate, desiring the speeding up of our lives that much means that we are no longer trusting God to do what is best for us.  Even though most of us stop well before something like suicide (the ultimate “speeding up” of life) this means that we cannot enjoy the present moment as we should.  This also affects the service we render to God since instead of keeping our eyes on Him, we are focused on speed..  He gave us the present moment for reasons of His own, and wishing to do away with it is a form of defiance.  If we continue to defy Him in that way, even justifying our rushing as “an absolute necessity,” like the dad in the song, then we can even blind ourselves to our disobedience.

Slow Down

Furthermore, we could be missing out on a lot of joy here and now if we refuse to slow down to appreciate the moment, particularly whatever that God may be desiring of us.  Whether it’s the experience of meeting someone new, seeing a pretty sunset while traveling, or, if we are stuck in the middle of a workday and have no particular happiness at that moment, we can still give glory to God in some way through normal obedience.

But, if our society is always pushing us to go faster and faster when God wants us to slow down, it seems hard to figure out what to do.  Obviously, I have this problem just as much if not more than anyone else, but here are some suggestions.  First, try setting aside just a moment each day to ask God, “Am I using my time wisely?”  Prayer is always a good resource when struggling with life.  Second, for those who are more inclined to human interaction, like me, one option is to ask someone like a pastor or spiritual director for advice.  Another good option is a simple evaluation of your priorities.  Sit down and ask yourself questions like, “Am I stopping to enjoy life?  Am I too preoccupied with obligations to think about what really matters?  Am I treating the most important people in my life (e.g. spouse and kids) as though they truly are?”  As long as we focus on getting the correct answers to those questions, then our lives will be more closely conformed to what God wants them to be.  Once we do that, He will take care of the rest.