Feeling the freeze…
One of the greatest gifts of winter is one I’m inclined to fight: slowing down. At a molecular level the cold air arrests momentum lengthening the time between action and reaction. Nearly every children’s cartoon depicting a sudden freeze shows the fish or the frog or the flower or the chattering squirrel speeding along about their business until gradually they slow slloooow sslllooooooowww and stop. Not gone, not deceased, not unrecoverable, just slowed way down until nearly or completely motionless. The world is preserved, nearly timeless, in crystalline casings. Beautiful, no?
Scenes of cabins nestled in snowy mountains or Japanese gardens in winter looking like someone took icing sugar to all the trees and pagoda statues fill me with serenity. All year long I pull up these images to bring in this kind of peace and calm, but as winter sets in and to do lists pile high I’ve begun to miss the invitation to participate in slowing down. I live in a world and mentality of do more, do better, do faster, do now. To what end? Well, plenty. There are budgets to consider, and other people’s time, and schedules to keep, and constant improvements to be made, don’t you want to make improvements? The reasons for the haste and rush and efficiency optimization are legitimate, but there’s a season for that attitude: summer. Going fast when things are fast works better, and I do love going fast. It’s exhilarating. Downhill skiing, a winter pastime, is probably my favorite sport. Fast is fun! Fast feels productive and exciting. Fast is an unsustainable path to burnout.
So what does it mean to slow down? (Especially in a busy life in a busy world.) The demands and pressures on time and commitments will not stop just because I’m choosing to slow down. Is it possible to slow down while maintaining, and, ideally, fully living my life? Honestly, I don’t have complete answers to these questions…yet. I believe slowing down is the right mode to set for my 10 Weeks of Winter. I believe it is at the core of the work, but it presents a kind of paradoxical conundrum (big words meaning a counterintuitive puzzle). I am building processes, new approaches and practices, into my everyday life hoping to spark up that internal winter furnace while at the same time rooting the change in slowing down.
Noticing super powers…
The mantra that returns me home to slowing down is: deliberate action. Think again about a frozen landscape, how do you traverse it? Whether by car, on foot, snowshoe, or cross-country skis the only effective way forward is deliberate action. When its icy, you go slow. When it’s cold, you use more fuel to lift and step and huff and puff. You can’t waste your precious energy, you have to use it right. Most efficiency derives from deliberately chosen and executed tasks. It’s a lesson I learned from practicing yoga many years ago. When shifting between poses the more I was able to feel into every tendon, every bone, every twitch and squeeze of muscle, and every exhale the better, and actually faster, I was able to move through a stance. The practice deepened for me when I realized that a sustained stance may appear from the outside like the cartoon fish frozen in the pond, but the reality was more like inhabiting a time dilation field where in seconds that feel like minutes subtle responses, supports, and releases were in rapid but observable action, like my body was some great machine venting steam, injecting fluids, and hinging panels and appendages.
A different relationship with time…
Sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. Learning to slow down increases the carrying capacity of your time, and, if you think about, in a way it extends your life. If instead of living minute-to-minute you live second-to-second or even at a finer scale than that you have orders of magnitude (tens and tens) more time. Slowing down my 70 days of winter could yield thousands of hours, hundreds of thousands of minutes, and millions of seconds of living life. Or I could just try to get through it and cram as much additional stuff and ambition and obligation and demand as possible into it. It’ll be over before you know it. It’s only 10 weeks.
It’s as clear as a bright wide-horizoned winter day in Saskatchewan (a stunning vista I’ve only heard about but have yet to experience), slowing down is the right mode to adopt. Does it mean things will take longer? …Yes. At least at first. As I begin, I expect that I will I have to do one thing at a time, and I will have to learn how to do some of the protocols and practices that are new or that have fallen out of practice and habit. For example, I have not done the breathing practices yet today. Why? It’s not something I regularly do and there’s a significant amount of resistance to trying, even though it’s not something I’ve never done before, even though it’s short, even though I planned to do it, and even though I believe it is worth doing. I will do it (right after I finish writing this), but my resistance to it this morning tells me that I need to learn it. I need to relax my expectations and anticipation of what it will be and let it be something new. Eventually I know it will fit right into my other routines. Things always do.
The cold is calling…
For today, and for the next week or two, I will let things take longer. I will not indulge my frustration at my inefficiencies. I may still plan for and try to do things beyond my capacity, that’s my inclination, but I will let the season invite me into the super power of noticing. I will look at the overbooking, overplanning, and over-expectation. I will let the magical chill of winter morning air bring me pause………and then I will choose deliberately, slowly, with focus and intention. I will follow the call of the winter cold and slow down.
Leave a Reply