500 Words a Week - The Power of Slowing Down in a Fast-Paced World.
Thomas Edison, the famous inventor, took regular time out of his day to go fishing.
Yet he would never catch anything, as he went fishing without bait.
When asked about why he didn’t use any bait he responded:
"Because when you fish without bait, people don't bother you and neither do the fish. It provides me my best time to think."
Thomas had crafted a unique practice in which he would be forced to slow down.
This week marks the end of the first week back for many people from their Christmas Break. How quickly did the rhythms of life start back up? Did you find yourself right back into the rush of the day to day activities that you were experiencing pre Christmas? Immediately thrown back into everything, forced to paddle frantically to keep up with the tide?
For others, who didn’t get a break over Christmas, do you find yourself feeling like time’s just passing you by? Back into the regular swing of things at work, perhaps even slightly less busy than the bedlam of the Christmas period. Thinking to yourself, is this what life looks like? An endless repetition of the same day, repeated over and over again.
Thomas reminds us to develop our own practice of slowing down. Of removing ourselves from the rush we have found ourselves in. Of creating a time and a place where we can understand what we are experiencing. Without this time, we never develop an awareness of what's going on around us. We end up just feeling like a part in a machine, endlessly performing the same routines. Until we might begin to develop a spec of rust, a small thought that all is not right with how we are living. Naturally, we ignore this warning sign, as we must still work to keep the greater machine functioning.
Unbeknownst to us, this rust grows, further thoughts creep in. Eventually, causing us to clog up, to stop moving, to break down. To your surprise, the machine keeps going, it doesn’t need you and once it saw the rust that began to form around you, it discarded you for another part. Once you were of no longer use to the larger machine, you were forgotten about.
Developing the awareness to understand what we are experiencing prevents this sudden breakdown described above. We are more conscious of our role within the greater world. We know when at times, we must step away for our own sanctity.
Taking this time to slow down allows us to understand what is truly important within our life, and to ensure we don’t sacrifice what’s important at the altar of the trivial.
There is nothing inherently wrong with being a part of a larger machine. The problem lies when we aren’t aware of how much of ourselves we may be sacrificing. When we understand this, we can begin to create boundaries that prevent us from giving all of who we are away.
We may not need to fish without bait, but we can walk around a park, a neighbourhood. No phone, no music. Just perhaps us, our thoughts and our surrounding environment.
