“Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from themselves.”
-Nietzsche
I hate slow. I’m one of those city dwellers who, when caught behind a gaggle of tourists admiring the local architecture, will huff and scowl until I find a way to weave around them. I hate lengthy explanations (get to the point already!) I hate waiting in line (I’ve already thought of 1,000 ways this process could be more efficient!) Slow talkers baffle and frustrate me in equal measure (How am I supposed to know if you’re done talking or just pausing mid-thought?) In another life, I was probably an overcaffeinated newspaper editor, in this one, I have to settle for listening to podcasts at 2x speed.
I never thought there was any sort of problem with this: if anything, the rest of the world should learn from my SPEED and EFFICIENCY!!! But in recent years, I’ve started to wonder about my warp-speed tendencies. Is it a problem that I can only relax when I’ve hit my daily word count, the kids are fed, washed, and put to bed, and the house is spotless? Considering how infrequently that all happens, probably! If I did manage to make it all happen, I usually only had the energy to collapse onto the couch to watch a single sitcom before bedtime.
But as my husband and I sat watching one of the more lackluster episodes of “Superstore” one night, it dawned on me: is this what I’d been waiting for all day? Was the pinnacle of my life watching sitcoms? (Well, we are living through peak TV.)
I began to recognize a daily attitude of just-get-through-this. I was constantly looking forward to the next thing, again and again, until the day was over, and then I had to wake up and do the whole thing over—a pretty grim realization. Why did I do this? Were my days that joyless? Did I hate my life?
Thankfully, no. As I paid more attention to the tasks at hand, I realized a lot of them were enjoyable: I like being creative in the kitchen, writing is a place I can achieve a state of flow; my kids can be hilarious and sweet, in between their near-constant squabbles. I even find vacuuming surprisingly meditative.
If I like most of my daily activities, why do I feel so rushed to get them over with? There’s this feeling of time scarcity—a building internal pressure to “use my time wisely,” whatever that means. I find myself rushing through other work to prioritize my writing time. Perhaps the lack of external validation (salary, happy boss) makes my domestic and care work feel unimportant. Perhaps it’s because, as Angela Garbes writes in Essential Labor, it’s because these belong to the oft-overlooked category of “maintenance work”: work that must be done again and again and again.
Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals calls this time pressure “instrumentalizing one’s time.” Burkeman argues that since the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism rewards those who can best turn their time into an instrument. The problem is, time isn’t just an instrument at our disposal, at some level we are our time.
While these societal mores make a certain amount of sense, I do think my hurriedness runs deeper. Part of it comes from my own particular brand of trauma response. You’ve probably heard of “fight or flight” but in addition to these two responses to danger, there’s also “freeze” and “fawn.” Many people employ a combo of two or more. Reading Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, I realized I’m a fawn/flight, what Walker calls “The Super Nurse”: I get busy caring for the needs of others so I can avoid facing my own problems. But while a trauma response can save your life in a traumatic situation, they’re not designed to be good day-to-day coping mechanisms.
It’s clear to me now—in order to experience the “Summer of Pleasure” I’ve been dreaming of; I need to STFD: Slow the Fuck Down. But…how?
Tune in for part two coming next week to see if I figure out how to enjoy the turtle life…
Journal/Discussion Questions:
What did it feel like to read that Nietzsche quote? Do you feel like you are running from anything by staying busy?
What’s your favorite trauma response?
Speaking of STFD, here’s the opening of the musical, Come From Away. Enjoy!