Inertia - Nº124

Take your time

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished

— Laozi

Novelty slows life down. I’ve been loving this lately. The beauty of biking through the county gardens of England is where you can feel like you’re always venturing somewhere new. Here is where time slows down. You glide through sun-drenched fields of blossoming lavender. The wind gently on your shoulders. You’re sailing along as a reminder to being in different places and no longer feel the same as you do on a traiditional day. You’re letting yourself move slower and breathe.

I’ve been learning about the relationship between time and understanding. Thinking about things through a deeper lens. Why overthink the homeostasis of the things we love when they should last more than 20 or 30 years? Our relationships, hobbies, or profession. The most important things a lot of time and work. But we’re always aiming for the shortest time horizons, not even thinking about the intricacies and energy expenditure over time. Our pursuits have natural demands, and too much time can pass before you truly stop and think about how much it takes out of you, and how fast the time can pass.

Nothing slows down for you—you have to make life do that. Carving out time, establishing boundaries, and learning to better maintain your attention are all things you learn over the years that become your most delicate qualities. Life depends on your ability to ask for the things you want. It’s about the loosely-termed self-improvement flowing through your actions, teaching you so much: approaching conflict with a greater sense of calm, defending your choices and opinions over surrendering to please others, and being able to reflect and pivot when you need to.

Your life is about your ability to put things into perspective. It’s how you listen, how you direct energy, how you close the gap between what you aspire to do and what you do now. You think you could do all this in a few days? Months? A year or two?

On top of all that, many of the important lessons can’t be learned alone. When reviewing the hard times, discovering gratitude, or in this rare state of taking life seriously, you need to be able to look back on past events and know what each person or situation has taught you. That means stopping and gaining an understanding that can’t be rushed.

Great endurance means being able to welcome reality and let the world be what it is and let people be who they are—you will push on regardless. It’s more comforting for us to bend reality to our will and paint ourselves as brave heroes. But this will keep us locked against nature. A worthless fight. The beautiful world outside of our skin will always say that life is filled with impermanence and disappointment. Motivation won’t last, and eventually, we will tire. That is why it’s important to have a horizon long enough for results to bloom and become obvious. Effort can look dormant most of the time, so it’s important to keep going and investing and forgiving and letting yourself explore new places and people that bring novelty and beauty back into your life.

Don’t let every breath be a sigh of exhaustion.