“And we’re off to the races!” said my teacher at the end of class yesterday. He was referring to the Grand Prix taking place here in Montreal this past weekend. For me it was a double entendre. Maybe a triple. Firstly, of course, it’s ironic because we’d all just risen from our peaceful savasana and were still in a post-yoga bliss/daze, secondly because he focussed a lot on the Sanskrit term “sama sthiti” in class which from my understanding is “even steadiness”. When I think of steadiness, I think of being still, of slowing the body, the muscles, the mind, which leads me to the third reason it was slightly ironic. I had decided before I went to class that I would blog about the importance of slowing down. Slowing down creates a steadiness, stability and so it seems the world is conspiring for me to write about speed.
I was thinking this week about the speed at which we in North America move and how it differs from other areas – particularly “developing” nations. When we travel to poorer countries, we inevitably return with comments like “they’re so poor but they’re still happy; everyone smiles” and it’s true. We appreciate it, are amazed by it, even try to integrate it into our daily lives once home. But inevitably fail shortly after our returns. We don’t even notice after a while how the smiles around us are not quite as genuine as they were on the poverty-stricken locals during our vacation; laughter not nearly as hardy.
What we generally do not try to adopt is the “mañana” attitude of many of our southern neighbours. Indeed, it is an attitude rarely appreciated by its deep-pocketed tourists. It creates frustration in the shops, banks and government offices, and while trying to find out when a bus leaves. How does anything get done, we wonder in amazement. I suspect it is slowly and steadily and everything that isn’t essential gets dropped, forgotten, and no one is the wiser. Not smiling or being happy seems acceptable enough to us in North America, but when it comes to getting things done…that is another story.
Here it’s a constant bus-i-ness. Without speed we are somehow less important. Speed – running from one thing, one place, one person to another – validates us, tells us and everyone around us, with our BlackBerries and Iphones that we’re important. Time is money and let’s not waste a single bit of either. We focus on the ringing and buzzing on our hips and stress ourselves to the point of illness. As if we didn’t have enough needless illness and pain in the world today we have to create it in the name of speed and stress.
A story to illustrate my point:
One day, when I was living in Toronto, I was driving up Jarvis Street just past Queen and the traffic came to a sudden stand still. It was hot, smoggy, horns were honking, people were getting visibly upset. I asked my husband to find out what was going on. “A little boy was hit by a car,” he said. We gave each other a look of combined horror and sadness. I turned off the car and sat back prepared to wait. A child had been injured. Several lives would be seriously changed – likely for the worse as a result of this accident.
Moments later, I saw smoke coming from the man’s ears in the car next to us. He was getting angrier and angrier by the moment that he was stuck in the traffic. I leaned out my window and gently explained that a child had been hit by a car, assuming this would help him relax. On the contrary. He got more frustrated and said “I have to get to the bank before it closed.” This guy was clearly someone important. Someone who didn’t have time to contemplate the life of a child. Deals were in place, money needed to be exchanged. He mustn’t have had time to get to the bank earlier and it certainly couldn’t wait until tomorrow. Any way you look at that situation it is a sad statement on humanity.
The metaphor of the race horse seems perfect to bring up here…the idea that we are like the horse wearing blinders, moving so quickly toward the finish line that we miss everything along the way. There’s no possibility of distraction that way, but I fear what happens is that miss the very things that make us human – that connect us to the rest of society. The guy in the car next to me was so disconnected to humanity that he had no sympathy or empathy for the accident that had occurred, for the lives changed.
We move so fast that we fail to smell the spring lilacs not to mention how well we avoid the eyes of those in need on the street. I admit I am guilty of these things, too. Guilty of what psychologist Daniel Goldman calls the urban trance. We keep things in our periphery so we don’t have to act. Whether it is in our physical periphery like the a homeless person looking for a little spare change or it’s our intellectual periphery like not informing ourselves of the state of humanity, society or the environment – be it knowing a little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the realities of the child sex trade. And more often than not, it is also our emotional periphery. If we slow down that means we have to face the fact that we’re not smiling, we’re not happy. But happily in a trance, with blinders on, we don’t have to do anything except move toward the end goal. We don’t have to act. We don’t have to feel.
Multi-tasking is not my middle name, much to the chagrin of my mother, who cannot watch a movie without doing something else like sewing or cooking. Me? I prefer to do one thing at a time, with careful attention. This is not to say I can’t multi-task or don’t – I’m actually pretty good at it when I have to. I simply prefer not to. But I don’t see it as a skill to promote, to be proud of.
And I guess that’ what attracted me to Iyengar yoga. In other styles of yoga, the poses are moved through quickly – heat builds up, there’s no time to think, to contemplate the pose. But in Iyengar, we don’t move from pose to pose quickly (too many props to get set up, maybe?); they are held longer. I confess that some days, as beads of sweat roll down my forehead, I wish they were held for a shorter time. But by holding the pose, we focus on the details, the movement of each muscle cannot be ignored. It builds strength, stamina, and steadiness – attention to detail and focus. I think it’s fair to say we could all use a little more of this in our daily lives. By slowing down we don’t become weaker and less important. We are actually getting stronger – building emotional and intellectual strength. We become connected to our selves and to the world around us.
There’s an entire subculture growing around the idea of slowness. It began with the Slow Food, which focuses on local, traditional food and has moved into every other area of life such as travel, parenting, and media – the list is long but its philosophy is the same. Humans have basic needs like being loved, appreciated and in order to get these basic things we need to slow down. And the only way to fully master and manage the inevitable changes in our lives – you got it, we need to slow down.
So I urge you to join the movement. Do it in whatever way is possible for you. Embrace slowing down, appreciate the focus and attention it brings where we can know more, understand more, connect more – where we can smile and be happy. Genuinely.
