Speed can slow you down...

“The faster I go, the behinder I get.”

- Lewis Carroll

We were wandering home after the movie, and had taken one of the side roads to avoid the Interstate.  As I looked in my rearview mirror, there was a woman driving a late model Mazda tailing me closely enough that it might have warranted a dinner invitation, had we been able to speak.  I politely tapped my brakes to let her know I wasn’t sure we knew each other quite well enough to be…how should I put it politely…nearly so intimate with one another.

The last section of this bypass is four-lane, so as soon as we got to that point, she zoomed by me, giving me ‘the look.’  Off she went like the rabbit in Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare, and slipped out of site.  I was thinking as she went by, “go for it lady.”

Justice for the tortoise came as a result of the hare’s belief the turtle was no competition. But the tortoise just kept plodding along, and as the story goes, crossed the finish line first!  The moral?  Well there are a couple of them. 

Tortoise: When in the arena, stay in there, don’t give up, keep at it, and be steady. 

Hare: No matter what one thinks of their skill set, one must ‘be’ and ‘stay’ in the arena.  Confidence, dare I say overconfidence, must be matched with action.

Justice in my case came a little more quickly in the form of a stoplight.  Rounding the corner, there she was waiting at a red light.  As I pulled up behind her, I snuggled my car close to the back of hers.  She glanced up.  She had blown by me because she was in a hurry, but here we were, together at the stoplight…ah, the stoplight…the great equalizer.  We shared a brief ‘rear view mirror’ moment, smiled – both ‘getting it’ – and as the light turned green went on with our day.  Okay, I did feel a little satisfaction – this time.  I smiled again reminding myself how often I had been the one in a hurry, only to find myself sharing the stoplight with the person I had passed.

It doesn’t take much happening around me to get small take-aways from events in my life.  Hurrying up, doesn’t always get one there faster, and taking one’s time doesn’t always make one late.  I was reminded Lewis Carroll’s great lines in Through the Looking Glass.  Alice had been running with the Queen, and when she stopped, noticed she was in the same place as where she started:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." 

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Then I thought about the unavoidable BIG STOPLIGHT at the end of our journey, and all the little stoplights of life along the way.  I thought about how it is we occupy ourselves and how, in the moment, we feel things to be so important, that we must ‘get there quickly.’  AND yet, in the end, we will find ourselves at the same intersection.  That caused me to smile a little too.

It’s how we live our lives that counts.  If we hurry, hurry, hurry, we run the risk of missing a lot along the way.  If we do nothing, we run the risk of, well…doing nothing.

Getting older has its benefits and liabilities.  The benefit is a richer understanding of the importance of appreciating small moments and finding meaning in them.  The liability, at least for me, is that it has taken many years to find the proper pace.  

“Youth wasted on the young?”  Maybe…but then again, letting those speeders slip by while focusing on the things that are important to us…is key.  Let them go, because, an energetic push to ‘get there’ frequently keeps one from appreciating the journey.  You know, "...it's not the destination, but the..."

The trick in life?  Finding the proper speed!

- ted