Choosing To Be Placid Amidst All The Hustle And Bustle

A little time lapse photography captures it nicely.



Addendum: Appreciative thanks go to Dougald Hine, Proxima, and Steve Williams for their assistance in helping me to embed the video directly into this post.

It turns out to be ultra simple: In the bottom right corner of the original video there is a button for menu. Click that, and then select embed and then select copy to clipboard. Then in the body of your post, in "Edit Html" view, paste the HTML code from the clipboard, and then publish post directly from the Edit Html button on Blogger dashboard...easy peasy.

It's More Than Just Applying The Brakes

I've been thinking a lot about this whole process of taking time, not rushing, and my mantra: "I will rush no more!"

It occurs to me that imbedded in the statement is an invitation to slip into an alternate way of being. I am coming to the conclusion that it (my mantra) is like a skeleton key for a portal to a different way of being and experiencing. If you go too fast or if you are preoccupied and harried in your "going" then you will miss the portal and the opportunity. But if you go at the right pace and with a state of mindfulness, i.e., being in the moment without the flood of judgements and preferences and qualifications, then the passage presents itself and you can slip into it.

However, if the "not rushing" is coming from a place of just putting on the brakes, a having to slow down, in the sense that it's a rule or a mandate, rather than a preference and an active choice, then it loses all of its magical potential. A rough approximation would be having to slow down in traffic but being frustrated the whole time because the impulse is to continue speeding, for whatever reason. Perhaps the classic situation would be with a person who has what is called Type A behavior. A person with that is suffering from an ongoing sense of time urgency, and anything or anyone who impedes that urgency is seen as a source of frustration. In those situations the best outcome (and it's not good at all) is to just endure the impedence; no growth there.

Most of the time simply not rushing will have a positive effect in my experience (provided it's not simply applying brakes). But the further gain will come when there is a softening into the moment and opening of the gates of awareness without preference. Nice things happen then, or more properly, new things have a greater chance of happening under those conditions.

There is one further piece in all this and that is that if you bring all of the "old" into the place of freshness, then it will just contaminate that place.

But all is not lost if you mess it up because the potential of using the skeleton key for the portal is always there. It's always there for the taking or experiencing. Sometimes I think it's like there is a revolving door which is ever present. If you enter, you leave one place, you move around, and then you can get out and be in the different place. And of course, the revolving door goes in the other direction also.

I'm talking about a skill. A skill for living well. A skill for improving the sense of appreciation and wonder and curiosity.

Rushing In My Dreams - Balancing Act?

In my last post I talked about procrastination.

During the week or two before writing that I became aware of several dreams in which I was rushing. There was no particular place that I was rushing to. No particular task to accomplish. Not running from anything. Just rushing. Just the feeling of pressure that comes from rushing.

It may have been related to the fact that I was procrastinating with those reports and that led to a feeling of "having to get something done." Maybe that's it; in my daytime consciousness I was doing a fairly good job of pushing the task out of my mind - and then in my sleep / dream time world, it shows up as the concrete abstraction (how's that for juxtaposing two words) of just plain rushing - without any specific content.

But another thought also occurred to me. That was that with any change there is an inevitable backlash which tries to re-establish the original state of affairs.

In my situation, I started this process when the words "I will rush no more" became my mantra by applying them in an ongoing, daily, and gradually expanding manner. The "ongoing" was important because to not do that it would just become another incomplete experiment in living and I've had enough of them already. The "daily" was important because that has a more cumulative power and helps to maintain momentum. An analogy would be with exercise. It's better to do some exercise every day than to save it up for extended periods of exercise every few weeks or so. As we all know that is the surest way to increase injuries and then that will set the person back even further.

And the "gradually expanding" was important because that both makes it real and that also makes it much more interesting and "alive."

I also wanted it to be gradual to forestall the inevitable backlash. The bigger the initial change, the more abrupt it is, and the more radical it is the bigger will be the pushback. It is as if the force of habit of the original lifestyle suffused with rushing and mindlessness and consumerism has a life of its own, and if you push hard, it will push back hard. Isn't that one of the basic laws of physics - every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It's not just physics. That's also life.

Another way of looking at this is that a person or a system tends to keep doing what it's doing unless it is acted on by an unbalanced force. (If all the forces are balanced, i.e., equally counteract each other, than the object / system will either remain stationary or will continue at it's same rate of speed and in the same direction it's headed.)

The strategy I adopted was to apply an unbalanced force combined with the principle that "the slow way is the fast way." You could call it a stealth approach the goal of which was to allow for change of very well ingrained habit clusters (lifestyle, society-style) by keeping the change beneath the radar so the pushback would be (almost) avoided.

To go back to the dreams now, I wondered if the mindless rushing in my dreams was a signal that "the old way" was "creeping" back in?

And then an interesting thing developed. When I made this connection, the dream sequence ceased ( - at least so far.) My further thought was that now the new system (I will rush no more) is well established and the pushback from the dreams (unfocused rushing) is a "threat" to the new and more prized system and therefore I / it wants to neutralize the potential resurgence of the old system.

Neat.