What if, instead of rushing headlong into everything at such speed, you committed yourself to slowing down, just a little?Yes, even you, with so many important and urgent projects and responsibilities to take care of that you don't have a moment even to think.How would a 5% reduction in pace be for you?Walk just a little slower from meeting to meeting. Pause, just a little longer, before you speak. Breathe just a couple more breaths before you answer or make that call. Sit, for just a second to two, before you switch from one task to another. Listen, just a little more attentively, and let what the other person is saying sink in, for a moment longer, before you respond.Open up a tiny space where there was none before.You might imagine that nothing that's important will get done if you commit to this, such is your certainty that there's never enough time in any case.But you could find that your relationships with others deepen, bit by bit, as they begin to feel your quality of contact with them deepen also; that you can be more genuinely responsive; and that you react in fewer of the predictable, automatic, indiscriminate ways that have become your habit over the years.And you might discover that slowing down so you can be present to yourself and others actually makes it possible for you to get to more of what you really care about, rather than less.
Photo Credit: Tim Donnelly (TimboDon) via Compfight cc
When we are children it seems obvious to us that the adults have it all figured out.But when we reach adulthood we start to see how little any of us understand. We find out how tenuous our hold on life is. People get ill, die, and disappear at unpredictable intervals from our lives and from life as a whole. Our inability to predict the outcomes of our actions becomes clear to us. And that we are constantly subject to forces - social, natural, historical - that are much bigger than we are.And what do we mostly do? Pretend that we have it all together. That we understand. All the while desperately and quietly hoping that someone who knows will come along and tell us what to do.It doesn't take long for the cover story - whatever it is that we get up to that makes us feel secure or distracted from the uncertainty of everything - to become our life, our story about who we are. We identify ourselves with our job, money, title, house, social group, spiritual path, possessions.We forget the true condition of our lives.And then, sometimes, if we are lucky, we catch a glimpse of all of this - in a sprawling night sky, in the darkness of a cave, in the silence of a grove of trees, in the eyes of a child.We remember that we've been taking ourselves much too seriously. And we experience for a moment the wonder and awe of living in the midst of a vast and extraordinary mystery that we can never figure out.
We are human beings because we participate in worlds - complex, interrelated systems of meaning, significance, relationships, tools and practices. A person is never just a physical object, but a participant in something much bigger than them, which they are contributing to and which is shaping them all the time.To see this clearly, try first living for a few days with a family that's not your own. You'll soon come to appreciate that, despite much being shared, much is different in this place. Words mean something subtly different. The way people eat, dress, argue, love have somewhat different meanings here. They relate to time differently, uncertainty, money, mess. The significance of the past, the possibilities of the future - all with their own nuance. And most of this, that you can see so clearly by being with others, is usually invisible in your own life, a transparent background upon which all else is founded.Then extend your inquiry by living in a culture very different from your own for a while. Here, the difference between your world and the one you are visiting will start to reveal the way world extends into everything. What buildings mean and are for, what it is to sleep, wash, work, parent, pray. What 'community' is, or 'society'. What constitutes suffering and what constitutes joy. What people are, what life is for. All 'world' and all present in your own life but mostly invisible in its everyday familiarity.It's striking that our bodily, biological similarity to one another is precisely what makes our widely varying worldhood possible.When we reduce people to generalisations, statistics, measurements, personality types, exam scores; or to their merely physical presence - brains, neural structure, blood chemistry, bodies - we leave out all of this vital context that makes them the particular kind of beings that they are. These reductions are necessary, sometimes, but we miss out so much that's important when we mistake the reductions to be what's most essential about us.It's no trivial matter, because the deworlded, reduced account of people dominates our understanding and discourse in much business, government, medicine and education and produces a kind of 'flatland' in which the full humanity of human beings has quite little room to show up.
Does it strike you......that the difficulty you complain about so often, to yourself, to others...is something that you have a part in keeping going...and that maybe there's something in it for you that things are just the way they are...some kind of self-esteem generated...the righteous, wronged, suffering one...who nobody understands...and that if you gave it up...you'd have to face that you have some responsibility for how things have been...and that there are choices, now, that only you can make?
The mastery of the 
Wheelwrights - the craftspeople who make wooden wheels for carts - are not much in demand in contemporary, mechanised, industrialised mass-production societies.But consider this: to make a good wheel, the wheelwright needs to be deeply sensitive to three different domains:The first is the forest. What kind of wood grows where, and when. The flow of the seasons, their rains and dry periods. The properties of each kind of wood, how it responds to cutting and shaping, what will happen to it as it dries and weathers, its capacity to bear load in different directions, the unique effect of knots in the grain, how it responds under pressure, and how all of this changes depending upon when in the season the wood is felled and when it is cut. A skilful wheelwright is attuned to all of this, able to tell just what is called for, and able to assess a piece of wood and just how to cut it well from its feel, its weight, its aroma, its colour.The second is the domain of carts. Precisely how the wood is likely to be used. The specific demands called upon in being pulled by horses or donkeys or people, in driving over firm ground and muddy ground, with the sorts of loads and distributions to be carried.And the third is people and culture. The wheelwright needs a deep understanding of the end-purposes for which people choose to use carts, and a similarly deep understanding of people in particular so that, when Arthur or Jenny or Miha or Danha ask for a wheel, it's possible to respond to just what is called for that will meet their particular concerns, their intentions, and the commitments they're in the midst of.A deep attunement to all three domains is what enables the wheelwright to provide just what's called for, just what meets the situation that calls for a new wheel, when a customer walks in.In a mechanised, mass production culture all three of these kinds of attunement are easily obscured. We are blinded by the production of vast quantities of products that are all the same as one another, standardised, uniform, efficient to produce, but which can only respond in the most generalised of ways to each of us, to our situation, to what's called for. We can easily come to think that the benefits of mass - the machines that can cut through any kind of wood whatever the grain, the standardisation of products that can be shipped quickly all over the world - are the only benefits worth looking out for.But what we gain in efficiency we lose in artistry, and in mastery, and in our capacity to develop our own deep kind of attunement to place, people, and materials. We produce products and services that do their job well in one way, but pay little heed to the particular human worlds in which they will be used. The effect? Efficiency at the cost of responsiveness to the richness and aliveness of human life.In some domains standardisation is vital. But there are many areas where we're effectively insisting on a mass-produced response when attunement is what's really called for.More on this tomorrow.
When you're afraid, but starting to see that it's time to move towards exactly that which your fear is having you avoid...
We find it incredibly difficult not to have a story.So we wrap stories around what we don't understand, around anything seems incomplete, around anything mysterious.Which means we're always making up stories about other people, whose actions we can see but whose inner experience we can never fully know. Instead of leaving ourselves in the dark, we invent intentions, thoughts, purposes and feelings on behalf of others - whatever will give us a coherent story to which we can respond.And then we forget that it's a story at all.And because it's our story and not theirs, it should be no wonder that it contains endless assumptions, projections, speculations, inventions, judgements - many of which will be coherent but inaccurate.And then no wonder that we can have such a difficult time getting along.One approach to all this? Cling more and more tightly to your story. Don't look for or let anything in that might blow it apart.Another? Adopt the radical move of dropping all your stories and listening for a while.But when you're prepared to treat another person, another team, another group, another community as mysterious enough, perhaps you'll discover that what's going on is way different from what you thought.More importantly, you'll give yourself a way of responding that actually meets the other person, sees them, instead of missing them by a mile.