Try Slow

How to sink into a human pace this summer

To give myself breathing room this week, I’m pulling an essay from the archives—back from 2021 when there were thousands (!) fewer of you here. If you’ve read it before, I hope you can savor it again. Our souls need Sabbath, slowness, and stillness. May you find some sacred space this weekend, too.

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1.

“Take more time. Cover less ground.” (Thomas Merton)

I first read these words in an email from a monastery. Right away I wrote them down in the book of wisdom I keep on my writing desk. When I met with a colleague later that week, she had the same words perched on a notecard by her computer.

We are both women who rush, who do too much, who want to cover every inch of ground.

We laughed that the same words found us both.

2.

When I scribbled down those lines from memory, early one morning before caffeine kicked in, I wrote the opposite:

Take less time. Cover more ground.

Ironic, isn’t it? Exactly what a technology-driven, consumerist culture teaches us to do. Go fast, leap long, hustle and grind. Never stop, never slow, never stay stagnant.

Resistance takes work. Religion must teach us to swim against the current.

3.

One day on vacation, we found ourselves in a sleepy seaside town, driving slowly on one-lane bridges. I spotted a roadside sign painted on a hand-hewn slab of wood.

“Try slow.”

The homeowner could have written “slow down” or “watch your speed” or “children at play.” But instead they offered an invitation into another way of life, a world foreign to many who speed by.

Try slow. See what happens.

4.

“Of the nearly eight million words that have floated through my head onto a page, some of which have been deemed publishable, I am happy with about four dozen sentences. Four of those sentences I think are especially fine. I weep whenever I read them in public, mostly in the thought of having been lucky enough for those words to have chosen me and for my having been smart enough to say yes to them when they came my way.

I am absolutely convinced of this: the more I am willing to go slow, to treat each blank page as a gift, to pay attention to each word and each phrase and each sentence, and to be patient as they come to me, the more likely I am to wander into being the writer I am meant to become.”

—Robert Benson, Dancing on the Head of a Pen: The Practice of a Writing Life

5.

Whenever I reach my wits’ end with a small child’s fit, I fling myself back upon a practice from my early years of motherhood. 

I sing an old hymn at a snail’s pace.

“Be Thou My Vision” or “For The Beauty of the Earth” or “I Sing the Mighty Power of God.”

I sing it so slowly that the young one looks at me strangely. But my soul settles into the stretches between verses.

I feel God pulling me into a slower pace, more human, more divine.

Suddenly I start to breathe deeper, too.

6.

Try something outrageously slow this summer. Chew your food slowly. Read a book slowly. Pray an old prayer slowly. Take a slower walk than your usual pace. 

Do nothing for five full minutes.

What do you notice? 

7.

Shabbat comes with its own holiness; we enter not simply a day, but an atmosphere. My father cites the Zohar: the Sabbath is the name of God. We are within the Sabbath rather than the Sabbath being within us. […]

“Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath … one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.” It was on the seventh day that God gave the world a soul, and “[the world’s] survival depends upon the holiness of the seventh day.”

The task, he writes, becomes how to convert time into eternity, how to fill our time with spirit: “Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else.”

—Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath