Smell the Roses

It’s the first day of vacation and I can’t slow down. My mind chatters like a runaway train: what to do first? Dust? Bake? Walk? I can almost hear it panting in my ear, a juiced-up puppy eager to bust loose.

Why is it that I feel pressed to do everything—even play—all at once? Granted, a jet moving at speed on an extended flight needs time to slow down once its wheels touch the tarmac. A sudden stop would flip it end over end, and I’d rather avoid a face-plant on my first day off.

Breathe, Ru.

PBS began a rerun of Wolf Hall, last week. Two episodes, back to back. I read the book by Hilary Mantel and wanted to see what Masterpiece made of it.

For most of the first episode, I was dying, the pace was so ponderous. It helped that I know the characters—told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, it’s the oft-told tale of his rise in the court of Henry VIII at the time of the King’s Great Matter. A darned good story worth retelling, else I may have packed it in at thirty minutes. I’m glad that I stayed with it, though, because after thirty-five minutes, it got interesting. By the end of the second episode, Ter and I were sold and looking forward to the next installment.

She guessed why: we had to slow down, ourselves. Once we did that, we could pay proper attention and the story came alive.

A friend once told us that he could teach anyone to juggle. “All you need is to stick with it for more than three minutes,” he said. Three minutes being the critical period required to catch and keep someone’s attention.

Are you kidding me? Three minutes? That’s all?

Apparently, it is. I am guilty of impatience if F***book takes too long to load, if more than two people are ahead of me in the checkout line, if I land at an intersection as the light turns red and I have to wait through the whole sequence.

I have two weeks to live life at my own speed. Right now, I’m on “world speed”. If I take three minutes to be still and silent, it’s almost guaranteed that my natural rhythm will kick in and suddenly I’ll believe what is true:

I have all the time I need.

I must use some of it to stop and smell the roses.