Appreciating Slowness
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"Where are you rushing to young man? You're already there." — Old Venetian Saying

"Yesterday is ashes. Tomorrow wood; Only today the fire burns brightly."
— Native American saying

We live in a world where hectic speediness going nowhere often takes the place of the gradual development of the soul and soulmate relations. We've been conditioned to lean forward in time, chasing after the red balloons, dangling carrots, golden rings, hottie, soulmate, ideal weight, and other images of success. We hurry through time, afraid that we'll miss it. It's always just up ahead, that thing that always eludes your grasp. Gotta keep going so that you can keep reaching toward it.

When we are goal-oriented rather than path-oriented, we live in a state of chronic time sickness. We hurry distractedly through time, trying to get someplace we think we see up ahead. Meanwhile, the time we are living in, the nowever, is degraded by our trying to hurry through it to get to where we think we want to be. But no matter how much we try to rush through time, we are still always in the nowever. Our lives unfold, and people, places, and things all change, but it's always us in the nowever. If we are preoccupied with the current people, places, and things, or the ones that we hope to find in the future, then we neglect those two constant factors — us and the nowever.

In doing so we lose the beauty and many possibilities of the nowever.

We also lose ourselves, and it always diminishes life when you neglect your relationship to yourself. That's another of the problems with trying to hurry through time. When we try to travel into the future to find our image of success, we forget an essential problem with travel as transformational intention. As Emerson put it, "The problem with travel is that you take yourself with you."

The problem with traveling into the future is that you take yourself with you. If you rush toward your image of success, you may lose sight of what you take with you — you. This is why so many people who achieve the image of success don't always enjoy it and sometimes self-destruct. They rush up the ladder of success only to find it's leaning against the wrong wall.

If you are a super ambitious asshole who eventually gets to be a movie star or a financial success or whatever by ruthlessly manipulating others, you may transform the people, places, and things around you, but it will still be you in the nowever. And in this example, the you that is in the nowever as your one constant companion is an asshole.

Hurrying through time to have the life you think you want doesn't work. Wholeness can only be found where it always is, within, so the more you try to chase it down by racing through linear time, the more it eludes your grasp. This is the ringwraith's path, forever seeking the Precious in the outside world, forever withering with unfulfilled desire.

Trying to hurry through time to find things that forever elude your grasp can lead to depression and crushing despair. We feel defeated by life when we are trying to do something that is intrinsically self-defeating.