Publications
Partners
The alarm clock rings and I hop out of bed.
I get my morning tasks done at the speed of lightning. Down my cup of coffee. Ensure everyone is sorted for their day. Hurry out to the car. Hightail it to the freeway. Use this time to make mental notes of personal and work tasks which need to be done.
Think about what I will be making for dinner. I weave in and out of traffic looking for the fastest lane. I reach work, mentally drained, an almost sprint into the building.
I take a deep breath and download those mental notes. Then I glance at my emails, start flagging what’s urgent, and park some of the mental ones.
This was me a while ago.
This is me now.
A slower-paced life; I enjoy my mornings, instead of rushing off to work in a frenzy. I take time to enjoy whatever I am doing — instead of always being connected to a Blackberry, tablet or laptop. I don’t think about work tasks and emails until I get to work. I single-task rather than switch between a multitude of tasks.
More and more it felt as if my life had turned into “need for speed” for a finish line that I will never reach.
No matter how fast we go, no matter how many comforts we forgo in order to quicken our pace, there never seems to be enough time.
We have all the proliferations of mesmerizing time-saving innovations — tablets/ I-pads, smart phones; drive-through’s, online shopping — yet the pace of life sneakily notches it up a level, we are never on par.
We complain about how busy we are, how overloaded modern life has become. The faster we go, the farther we fall behind. We get irritated at the end of the day, when we fall short of completing all those mental notes. We have an invisible stopwatch ticking.
As Carrie Fisher said, “Even instant gratification takes too long.”
We keep saying to ourselves we want to slow down because our lives are spinning out of control, which is ironic because speed has always been promoted as way to help us achieve mastery over the world.
We have made our life faster, but we are less patient. We have become more organized but less spontaneous...
We are preparing for a future which we may never see, and forget about enjoying the present. The tempo of life has accelerated; from the sun rising to the sun setting, to the changing seasons.
When will we reach a point where we ask “what’s the point” of running around like chickens without heads.
Fast cars, fast food, fast lane, quick fixes, speed reading, speed dialing, pizza in 30 minutes or money back, speed yoga. We’re even in a hurry for inner peace. We want it NOW!
Slowing down is a conscious choice, and isn't always easy, but it leads to a greater appreciation for life and a greater level of happiness.
We need to create our own speed which suits our internal pace. We all have a chance to slow down. We live in a world where speed is a drug, and the need for speed is a mindless addiction too.
We have marinated ourselves in a culture of speed; we call it the ‘rat race’; what we don’t realize that even if you win the rat race you’re still a rat.
I decided to slow down, because my health took a dive. Firsthand experience, I was overloading of stress on my body.
The human body needs a rhythm of sleep and awake, dark and light, stress and peace. Too much pace will weaken the immune system.
Life doesn’t have to be anywhere near as complicated as we make it.
Check out Saffiya's blog and follow her on Twitter
Follow Women24 on Twitter and like us on Facebook
