Slowing Down

The beach is a natural, easy place for me to slow down. It’s not so easy in real life.

I’m a type 1 on the enneagram, and I live by a schedule. Even on a day off, I make a list of things to do--write, journal, do yoga, read my Bible. With no list, I drift into sloth-like behavior. With no list, I read a book all day, and no one gets fed.

But the list also means that often I feel a constant pressure to go, move, hurry. My list can turn even pleasurable activities into items to check, and if I’m not making progress, those items can weigh on my conscience. I rush through things, and I get impatient when my family doesn’t keep pace. In the mornings before school, my kids eat breakfast on a timer, because without it, they--but especially my daughter--would talk and laugh aimlessly all morning.

What is so wrong with talking and laughing?

Yes, a schedule is important, and yes, my kids actually do have to eat breakfast and move on with life before we’re all late to school, but my emphasis on hurrying through can be detrimental to relationships. I’ve caught myself stopping in a mad dash of cleaning because Joe wanted to read me something he loved, or one of the kids had a funny story, but I raised my eyebrows and tapped my toe until they were done, and then I immediately swirled back into my tornado of hurry, without acknowledging the part of themselves they were trying to share. I’m ashamed of this behavior, but sometimes it feels like the only way to live, the only way to get things done.

So when I heard of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, I avoided reading it at first because I did not think I could eliminate hurry from my life. I, like the rest of the world, have places to go and people to see. There is no way to eliminate hurry, not if you want to be a productive member of society, like to eat, or are a mom.

I don’t think this way anymore. 

John Mark Comer is a pastor in Portland, Oregon. He wrote this book after realizing the devastation hurry was causing in his life, and he discusses why hurry is such an epidemic, and what it is doing to us. Then he invites us to look at the life of Jesus as our model--he calls it apprenticing ourselves to Jesus. Finally, he breaks down the acting on our apprenticeship into specific action steps. 

None of this sounds like rocket science, but I found this book to be both revolutionary and inspiring. I am a child of the WWJD movement, to which I ascribed and which also kind of scared me. Who can actually do what Jesus would do? I find it impossible to carry my cross every day unless he is holding most of the weight. 

But in John Mark Comer’s book, he shows specific actions Jesus took repeatedly in the Gospels, and showed how they connect to this time and place, to my very own life. As it turns out, there are practices of Jesus’s that I was already trying to follow: Sabbath, simplicity, silence and solitude. This book gave me better ideas for how to do these things, and gave me more concrete reasons to try.

I actually read this book before the pandemic hit here, and the past six months have given me lots of time to reflect on the ideas as my life slowed without my permission. I thought it would feel suffocating, but it has surprised me with the sense of peace. The pace will pick up again--it’s already starting--but now when I flip the pages of my planner, I like seeing the space between the words. I don’t want to be ruled by my calendar, and I want to keep exploring this way of living.

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