Relinquish

She’s cited this research many times, my former weekend running partner, the woman in lockstep with me all 13.1 miles of my one and only half-marathon:  It doesn’t matter whether we walk or run, it’s the miles we cover that keep us healthy and fit, not how fast we cover them.

Every time I see her she tells me the same thing. She’s a clinical massage therapist, trained to unfurl and smooth out the muscles we stiffen and shorten in the name of physical fitness:  The best exercise for our bodies is to stretch for 20 minutes daily.

 

By my rough calculations of classes attended, I’m pretty certain I’ve heard this no less than 300 times; it’s the mantra each instructor repeats verbatim in the opening posture of the Bikram Yoga series: “Breathe as much as possible, as long as possible, as slow as possible.” 

I know they’re right. I’ve realized the benefits of being kind to my body, heeding the warnings my knee began to whisper eight years into constant running. And yet there’s a part of me still wincing in guilt and shame as I admit I’ve quit because I needed to dial it down a few notches.

It’s not just the way I look at exercise.  It’s the way I look at life:  The growth strategies I’m plotting for my clients, the search my boys are on for the right pair of wings. While I know it all takes time, I can’t help but feel like I should be moving things along faster. I can’t seem to accept that slower is better, that less is actually more.

 “Where has the year gone?” we ask in puzzled amazement.  We’re here, on the brink of New Year’s Day, and can’t understand what happened to the last 12 months.  It seems a little ironic to be so surprised time moves quickly when we spend so much of our time with the accelerator pressed to the floor.

 

We are conditioned to attack life with speed and intensity.  We want to graduate early, win all our races, ascend up the corporate ladder on jet packs, we want our relationships to zoom into commitments, our families to grow on demand.  The ticking of a biological clock is deafening. The knell of the grave is terrifying.  What if we die before we’ve completed the bucket list?

I wonder if life gives the appearance of moving so fast because we’re so unwilling to accept a slowdown.  Is it a vicious cycle?  If we stopped trying to cram so much in, stopped trying to be so many things to so many people, if we stopped intervening in the name of moving life along, would we actually feel like life moves itself along at a more reasonable pace?

 

What if, instead of shaking down the tree of life for all the fruit we can knock loose, we could learn to rest and reflect in the shade of its branches until the fruit falls on its own?

In 2017 I want to become comfortable with slowing down, with giving life the time it needs to reveal all it has in store for us. Ultimately it means giving up this illusion of control I think I have over the universe, and calling a truce on what I know to be true:   Slower is better.