A moment for slowness

At every rest stop along the Eisenhower Highway System and every modern campsite, there are trash cans every 20 feet along the sidewalks and walkways. At first glance, this seems like a fantastic thing. People are throwing out their litter due to the convenience and the roads/campgrounds remain cleaner. It’s a great feat of urban planning. It is also incredibly disheartening. The idea that people need an effortless solution to their own waste in order to not make a mess of the land they are living on is embodied by these trashcans. At every rest stop, there is a trash can that is larger than the rest, a little bit more dinged up, older than the rest. That trash can serves as proof that just having access to a waste solution means nothing if people have to work a little bit to get there. We are a go-go-go type of people nowadays. Even with all these opportunities, I still see McDonalds bags littering the entrances to highways and caught in the tumbleweeds blown around the interstates. We have places to be and things to do, right? What is one bag thrown out your window if it means you will be able to beat the time shown on your GPS? What is one large soda cup tossed outside your tent if it means you can get a restful nights sleep without kicking it around? We so heavily value putting in effort and moving fast only in the name of being able to relax later.

Beyond the highways and trash cans this value is still embodied in the human spirit. You try to date in college. So, you can get married by 25. So, you can have kids by 30. So, you can be grandparents at a good age. You try to settle into a job you may not even enjoy all that much. So, you can make good money. So, you can get promoted to an administrative position. So, you can have a great stock portfolio and 401k. So, you can work until your 65. So, you can retire. There are many goal posts we set for ourselves be it locations to get to or things to do. We sprint for these goals and lose our breath trying to make it there. Once we do, we celebrate for an instance and then gaze into the distance and see that there is another finish line a little bit down the ways. So, you start the sprint all over again, forgetting that you had just broken the ribbon at a finish line that now means nothing to you.

What are we even running for?

I have always assumed that we put so much effort into the race so that we can relax, maybe for a night, or the weekend, or the rest of our lives. Maybe for some people this is all worth it. Not for me though. I don’t think the way I have taught myself to relax is worth it at all. Regardless, I run. With the MarioKart Coconut Mall soundtrack playing in my head, I run! I work as much as the school will legally allow me to do. I try to finish homework days before it is due. I put my energy into a club that was already 6 feet under when I came to it. For what? To lay in my bed for hours. Watching TikToks that I will forget as soon as they are swept off my screen. Watching a youtube video while scrolling on instagram. That is not rejuvenating. It’s mindless, it’s body-less, it lacks connection. Is it different from the go-go-go routines of daily life? Yes. Is it beneficial to me? Not really. And yet, that is what I run for. Those are the moments of celebration for crossing a goal post that I instilled so much significance in.

I find the idea of retirement downright terrifying. I cannot sit on my phone or iPad or laptop for the rest of my life, consuming content that means nothing to me. At that point, I may as well be dead. So, I imagine I would be like one of our grandmas or grandmas’ friend, who just never seemed to settle down. She has a whole schedule of things to keep her busy, but they are tasks with a bit less responsibility so she can call it a break from how hectic life was in her 40’s. She is a substitute teacher or a consultant. She is around the work place enough that people will walk over to the secretary and whisper, asking if she ever really retired. She is still running and will be until she dies. So what was the point of running in the first place?

I think it is because we believe that we will balance out all of the bodily effort expended eventually. When we sleep in on Saturdays, we are resting our body. When we finally have the time to go to church or meditate, we are connecting to something other than ourselves. One day we will go out to the bar and slur our speech with the stranger next to us, consciously creating meaning in our lives. We run and push ourselves endlessly, for the vague promise of being able to balance all parts of our psyche that will suddenly overcome us once the time has come.

What I fear is that we have all missed the moment when the key to balance laid in front of us. At the finish line of some goal, we ran straight through. Already looking ahead, we missed the little envelope that was resting off to the side of the trail, which contained the answers to all the mystery in our life. Now, as a consequence of all our god damn running, we are left on our own to figure out what the nebulous concept of relaxation really is and how to achieve it.

While I currently have an inkling that balancing the three parts of our psyche will have a relaxing side effect, I still feel a need to run as hard and as fast as possible and then numb myself with the allusion of a break. Taking moments of slowness, of intentional spending of time, feels less like not running and more like fighting against your own feet as they hit the pavement. From the moment I wake up I feel an urge to go far and go fast. To fight this urge is to dig your heels in to the gravel as your body continues to propel forward due to all the momentum you have already built up. To embrace slowness when you have been running for the last 21 years will require some degradation of the body as breaking from routine is bound to require some effort as well. All I can hope is that as I slow down, I will not walk past the alluring promise of balance. All I can hope is that I will look around a bit more than only forward. I will have the time to do so, but it is up to me actually expend the effort and tilt my head.