Restorative Reminders
Can Slowing Down Help Me?
- Anugrah
Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: Incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is ever enough.”
– Morgan Housel
Can Slowing Down Help Me?
As much as I understood slowing down can speed up things around us. Because, we have to be reminded in our star-struck, bemoaned understanding that we can make some goodness even when we are not owning the blinding life and deafening progress of hoarding, acquiring and display of our possessions.
Wallace Stevens in his forties, living in Hartford, Connecticut, hewed to a productive routine. He rose at six, read for two hours, and walked another hour—three miles—to work. He walked home from work… After dinner he retired to his study; he went to bed at nine. On Sundays, he walked in the park. I don’t know what he did on Saturdays. Perhaps he exchanged a few words with his wife…”
– Annie Dillard on Wallace Stevens, the American Modernist Poet (1879-1955)
Life is this. And so I wish, for you and for me that we just halt for a while and adore what we have now to hold. Because when evil strikes we will have less, very less time to think. Because then our lives will unravel like a rope and bit by bit fall apart.
And therefore, my prayer is every poem, every art, every book, every film, every song that you carry within may become your way to explore complexness and rationales, coaxing you to loosen up a bit. Because our lives and the lives of others are bigger than the anxious busyness of restocking our wants and more grand than how the world defines our success of becoming.
The heart of quietness streamed with art, culture and philosophical thought is not to make us Socrates or Aristotle but to help us make some sound decisions in our hamster-cage sort of life.
Hence, I reckon we will do much better. Better than what we are bombarded with at every level. Since we may think of ourselves as successful, yet still spend hours stuck in traffic.
We can redefine our success of becoming!
To End:
And so for this week, I will not inundate you with Internet blobs, but leave you with this calm poem by W.H. Davies, called “Leisure” (written in 1911):
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
This week may you find the warmth of the spring, courage to weather your storms and soak up in the glint of the balming sun.
Related Article: How do we see Leisure in our current work scenario
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