Modern civilization – which in many ways is not modern and hardly civilized – is obsessed with SPEED. And this obsession has made its way into the very fabric of our lives. It’s almost like a kind of…scent. Even things that are not designed to be exploited for speed, often end up becoming crushed beneath the wheel of “how fast can we do this?”Unfortunately, this obsession with speed has not been accompanied by an increase in quality. That is, instead of doing things faster and better, we tend to do them faster and faster, and spend whatever “time we saved” in our speed correcting errors that would not have been made if we weren’t going so fast! :) Funny, isn’t it? Sad, too.
Start to see if speed is dominating YOUR life. Are you focused relentlessly on “the next thing” that you have to do – the next thing on your list that needs to be crossed off – that you really pay little or no attention to the present moment? Are you living, essentially, in the service of your to-do list?
Remember: life is short! Even if you make it to 100 years…really, that’s not even a blink in the eyes of time – if you read a history book, 100 years doesn’t even get a chapter! And if you believe that speeding up your life will somehow help you get more OUT of it, you’re belief is quite incorrect. Speeding up your life to the point where you sacrifice the quality of the present for the promise of the future (which never comes, by the way – there is no such thing as “future”), is not going to help you get more out of your life. In fact, just the opposite will happen: years will FLY BY and you’ll miss them. It’s a paradox. The faster you live your life, the more of it you miss.
Take a lesson from folks who haven’t been…infected by the speed virus. Slow down. Simplify. Clarify. Enjoy the experience of being alive right here, right now. Because that’s all you have: here, now. Everything else is an illusion.
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