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Hmmm, is the world moving ever faster and we have to speed up to survive? Or is it just easier to hit the accelerator than to stop and examine why we’re not happy where we are?

“Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.”  ~ Barbara Kingsolver, U.S. Writer

What got me thinking along these lines was driving to work and watching two kamikaze lane hoppers make their way south on Dixie Road. You know the type I mean. They weave through traffic changing lanes every 20 seconds like a running back heading for the end zone. The rest of us are just obstacles in their path.

I couldn’t help but wonder where they are in such an all-fired hurry to get to. They seem desperate to arrive before anyone else as if there is a prize for being first across the finish line.

“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.”  ~ Rupert Murdoch, Chair of News Corporation.

Hard to argue with Murdoch’s logic when you take a look around. High speed trains rocketing across the countryside at 200 km/h… Jet plans streaking through the sky at 885 km/h… pocket rocket computers that process information in nanoseconds.

We are a speed obsessed culture. Obsessed with compressing the time it takes us to do everything. Fast food restaurants… Five minute microwave meals… Fast acting medications… Drive through windows at the coffee shop because we’re in much too much of a hurry to park and walk in.

Wasn’t technology supposed to free up our time and give us leisure? Doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. On the contrary, the faster technology gets the faster we seem compelled to go to keep up. We are forever racing the clock as if our life depended upon saving precious seconds.

I confess that I am all too often caught up in the greed for speed. I catch myself shifting into high gear for no particular reason. When I ask myself why, all I can come up with is that I’m on a race to nowhere – because I never get to that place when I can afford to slow down.

“There is more to life than simply increasing speed.”  ~ Mahatma Ghandi, Indian Philosopher

The truth is we’re racing ourselves into an early grave. The more speed obsessed we become the more stressed we become. Stress feeds speed and vice versa.

We get a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror of metaphor when two land hoppers try to merge into the center lane at the same time. It’s a disaster in the making right before our eyes – until one cues in at the last second and veers off.  But its inevitable that the crash will come somewhere down the highway.

We need to slow down our lives or we’ll crash and burn just like the land hoppers. Stop and smell the flowers. Calibrate our lives to natures rhythms and seasons rather than the unending race to nowhere. It really is about the journey rather than the destination.

“Since time is the one immortal object which we cannot influence – neither speed up or slow down, add to nor diminish – it is an imponderably valuable gift.”  ~ Maya Angelou, American Poet

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Michael Robert Dyet is the author of “Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel”. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog.

Tags:   Angelou · Ghandi · Kingsolver · lane hoppers · metaphor · Murdoch · race · speedNo Comments