Ease Up

The dif­fer­ence between work­ing all day, and get­ting a lot done on the farm, or spend­ing the day in the repair shop had to do with eas­ing up a bit on the machine. It is a trick I learned early in life. Any­thing that gets pushed winds up bro­ken. There is no bet­ter way to fall behind than to get in a hurry. Rushed deci­sions are usu­ally bad ones. Most of our dead­lines are imag­i­nary. The real ones we miss are from poor plan­ning or pro­cras­ti­na­tion. Get­ting into your day means tak­ing the load on gen­tly, and then not allow­ing your­self to fall into some sort of sloppy “always in a hurry” mode.

The same is true for dri­ving places. Get­ting some­where minus the twenty min­utes it takes to get a speed­ing ticket is the best way to travel. The speed limit may seem slow, but you still get where you are going ahead of the guy that passed you (that is now on the side of the road for his ticket, lec­ture, and fine). Wave as you go by. At the next stop­light you would have caught up with him any­way. Being in a hurry suc­cess­fully is an illu­sion. (Ever been passed angrily by some­one that pulls off at a con­ve­nience store a mile far­ther down the road? Ever won­der why he or she is in a hurry to stand in line to watch peo­ple buy lot­tery tick­ets? Insane!)

I do not drive an ambu­lance. I am not a mem­ber of a vol­un­teer fire depart­ment. As far as I know, I am not run­ning from the police. Life is at the pace of walk­ing. I truly wish we would stop call­ing it the human race and refer to our­selves as mem­bers of the human walk. It is a much more apt descrip­tion. What is the hurry? Time is not money. Time is part of the space-time con­tin­uum that is rel­a­tive to grav­ity and speed. Do not fight it. You can­not win pit­ting your­self against it. Sub­tract the extra ten miles per hour to save the organs of your body that are being burned up by stress enzymes. “Hurry up and wait” is a par­tic­u­larly mod­ern form of insanity.

Con men and women use the hurry up tac­tic when swin­dling bank tellers and cashiers (and at your office or home door as well). They seem to be in some sort of crisis/hurry and YOU are the prob­lem — so hurry up and fall for their gig. They know you know how to hurry (they also know that hur­ry­ing you keeps you from think­ing clearly).

Ease up. The speed limit of life is in days, years, and decades — not miles per hour.