What Happens When I Stop Rushing?

This weekend I drove to Milwaukee to spend some time with Michael Bettine, a percussionist and gong player whose work I’ve admired for a while.

Before I left, I decided I was going to drive the speed limit the entire way.

That may not sound particularly profound.

For me, it was.

I love driving. I’ve always driven fast cars, and I like driving them fast.

Which is maybe a little funny for someone who spends so much of his life thinking about slowing down, meditation, awareness, and the nervous system.

But I think part of the reason I’ve always loved driving fast is that it creates its own kind of awareness.

When I’m driving quickly, I am completely there.

I’m watching the car ahead of me. I’m aware of the car coming up on my left. I’m noticing the opening three cars ahead. My hands are on the wheel. My attention narrows. There isn’t much room to think about anything else.

It is an incredibly heightened state of awareness.

And I enjoy it.

In some strange way, I think that has something in common with why I’m drawn to meditation.

Both bring me completely into what is happening.

But they get there very differently.

One through intensity.

The other through stillness.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if I know the first kind better than I realized.

I’ve been thinking a lot about thresholds.

This started because I’ve been writing about zukoh, a powdered incense traditionally used as a form of purification. I’ve started introducing it at some of my sound baths, and what interests me most about the practice is the way it marks a transition.

You were doing whatever you were doing before you arrived.

Now you are here.

A tiny ritual creates a boundary between those experiences.

That idea has been following me around.

I’ve started noticing how rarely I allow one experience to actually end before beginning another.

A sound bath ends, and I immediately start cleaning up.

I finish teaching, check my phone, get in the car, and head home.

A meeting ends and another task begins.

There is almost always a next thing.

So I’ve been experimenting with creating little thresholds of my own.

After a sound bath, instead of immediately cleaning everything up or rushing home, sometimes I take a walk around the block.

It isn’t really a meditation.

I’m not trying to accomplish anything with it.

I just walk.

I give myself a few minutes to let whatever just happened be finished before I ask myself to enter whatever comes next.

The drive to Milwaukee became another version of that experiment.

I left myself enough time.

I stayed around the speed limit.

I stopped looking for every opportunity to get ahead.

Cars passed me.

And I let them.

At first, I could feel the impulse to do what I normally do. Move over. Speed up. Find the opening. Make up a few minutes.

But after a while, something changed.

I relaxed.

And because I relaxed, I suddenly had something to compare my normal state against.

That may have been the most interesting part of the whole drive.

I had never really thought of the way I normally drive as stressful. I enjoy it.

But now I could feel what it asks of my body.

Alert.

Scanning.

Anticipating.

Ready to respond.

Even when nothing is wrong, my nervous system is being given a steady stream of little problems to solve.

And somewhere on I-94, I started wondering how much of my adult life I’ve constructed the same way.

I push.

I pile things on.

I fit another thing into the day.

I see ten empty minutes and immediately wonder what I can do with them.

I finish one thing while already mentally entering the next.

I’ve always thought of this as energy. Ambition. Curiosity. Enthusiasm.

And I think it is all of those things.

I don’t want to turn qualities I genuinely value about myself into something pathological simply because I’m learning another way to live.

But I am beginning to see their cost.

Maybe the anxiety I sometimes feel isn’t always arriving from somewhere outside me.

Maybe sometimes I create the conditions for it.

Get there.

Finish this.

Start that.

Use the time.

Catch the opening.

Do one more thing.

None of those decisions seems particularly significant.

But together they create a way of moving through the world.

I think I have spent much of my adult life practicing urgency.

And like anything we practice, eventually it becomes familiar.

Maybe familiar enough that we stop noticing it at all.

That’s what was so strange about driving slowly.

I needed another state to compare it to.

Until then, the way I normally felt while driving was simply the way driving felt.

Then, for a couple of hours, I stopped trying to make the drive shorter.

And I realized something almost embarrassingly obvious.

I was driving to Milwaukee.

Why did I also need to be trying to get to Milwaukee?

I was already on my way.

I keep coming back to that.

Because I suspect I have spent a lot of my life being somewhere while simultaneously trying to get to whatever comes next.

The drive becomes something to get through.

Cleaning the studio becomes something to finish.

The walk to the car becomes dead space.

Ten free minutes become an opportunity to accomplish something.

One experience bleeds into another until the whole day starts to feel like one continuous movement toward a destination that keeps changing.

This is what has become interesting to me about thresholds.

Zukoh before a sound bath.

A walk around the block afterward.

Sitting in the room for a few minutes before I start cleaning.

Driving the speed limit to Milwaukee.

None of these things is particularly profound on its own.

They simply create a little space around an experience.

This happened.

Now this is happening.

And in that space, I’m beginning to notice myself differently.

I don’t think the lesson is that I should stop driving fast.

I still love driving fast.

I also don't want to turn slowness into another thing I need to be good at.

What interests me is that there seem to be at least two ways I know how to become completely present.

There is a kind of attention that comes from intensity.

I know that kind very well.

And there is another kind that seems to appear when I stop pushing.

It is quieter.

Wider.

Less interested in what happens next.

I drove to Milwaukee that way to spend the afternoon with someone who has devoted much of his life to listening.

I didn’t plan the connection.

But looking back, I like that the listening started before I got there.

For once, I wasn’t trying to make the space between here and there disappear.

I was in it.