Slowing Down To The Speed Of Life Quotes

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

Whereas during those months of separation time had never gone quickly enough for their liking and they were wanting to speed its flight, now that they were in sight of the town they would have liked to slow it down and hold each moment in suspense, once the breaks went on and the train was entering the station. For the sensation, confused perhaps, but none the less poingant for that, of all those days and weeks and months of life lost to their love made them vaguely feel they were entitled to some compensation; this present hour of joy should run at half the speed of those long hours of waiting.

You are told from the moment you enter school that time is constant. It never changes. It is one of those set things in life that you can always rely on...much like death and taxes. There will always be sixty seconds in a minute. There will always be sixty minutes in an hour. And there will always be twenty-four hours in a day. Time was not fluctuating. It moved on at the same, constant pace at every moment in your life. And that was the biggest load of crap that I’d ever been taught in school. Truth was, time did fluctuate. It was easy to lose hours or even days in a blink of an eye. Other times, it was a struggle to get through a mere hour. It ebbed and flowed as relentlessly as the tides, and just as powerfully too. The moments that you wanted to last forever were the ones that were washed away all too soon. The moments that you wanted to speed up, were slowed down to a snail’s pace. That was the truth of the matter.

Listen to me. Love is a Yeti. It is bigger than you and frightening and terrible. It makes loud and vicious noises. It is hungry all the time. It has horns and teeth and the force of its fists is more than anyone can bear. It speeds up time and slows it down. And it has its own aims and missions that those who are lucky enough to see it cannot begin to guess. You might see a Yeti once in your life or never. You might live in a village of them. But in the end, not matter how fast you think you can go, the Yeti is always faster than you, and you can only choose how you say hello to it, and whether you shake its hand.

The only way to gain power in a world that is moving too fast is to learn to slow down. And the only way to spread one’s influence wide to learn how to go deep. The world we want for ourselves and our children will not emerge from electronic speed but rather from a spiritual stillness that takes root in our souls. Then, and only then, will we create a world that reflects the heart instead of shattering it.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow. But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides. So on we go—we have a long way—no hurry—just one step after the next—with a little Chautauqua for entertainment -- .Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.

Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there’s no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you’ll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone’s nightmares come true.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself....To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountains which sustain life, not the top.

Life itself is the best (and the only) timekeeper.

The best thing about knitting is its slowness," says Murphy. "It is so slow that we see the beauty inherent in every tiny act that makes up a sweater. So slow that we know the project is not going to get finished today--it may not get finished for many months or longer--and that allows us to make our peace with the unresolved nature of life. We slow down as we knit.

speaking, as your level of understanding rises, you will have the experience of deeper feelings such as gratitude, calmness, peace, hope, and joy.

In truth I suspect that merely slowing down is not a very satisfying answer. What I need has less to do with my pace of life than my peace of life. At any speed, I crave a deep and lasting inner peace. And if it's solace I'm after, I don't need to pace myself like a turtle, change jobs or set up house on a quiet island. It is usually frenetic living, not high energy, that robs my peace of mind.

Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES--modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft.

Spiritual growth is not running faster, as in more meetings, more Bible studies, and more prayer meetings. Spiritual growth happens when we slow our activity down. If we want to meet Jesus, we can't do it on the run. If we want to stay on the road of faith, we have to hit the brakes, pull over to a rest area, and stop. Christianity is not about inviting Jesus to speed through life with us; it's about noticing Jesus sitting at the rest stop. While the church earnestly warns Christians to watch for the devil, the devil is sitting in the congregation encouraging everyone to keep busy doing "good things.

While most of us wouldn’t write ourselves a nasty letter, read it, and then feel offended, this is precisely what we do with regard to our thinking. We

Speed of life is a killer not a healer, so slow down to bloom like a flower.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

It’s pretty hard to get to another star system. Alpha Centauri is four light years away, so if you go at 10 per cent of the speed of light, it’s going to take you 40 years, and that’s assuming you can instantly reach that speed, which isn’t going to be the case. You have to accelerate. You have to build up to 20 or 30 per cent and then slow down, assuming you want to stay at Alpha Centauri and not go zipping past. It’s just hard. With current life spans, you need generational ships. You need antimatter drives, because that’s the most mass-efficient. It’s doable, but it’s super slow.

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.

Mental health has commonly been called conscience, instinct, wisdom, common sense, or the inner voice. We

Its the same for every career and life decision. You just have to keep driving down the road. It's going to bend and curve, and you're going to speed up and slow down, but the road keeps going.

A healthy heart doesn’t pump at the same rate all the time. That would actually be a really unhealthy heart. The healthiest hearts are adaptable, and the quicker they adapt, the better. When you start running, your heart should ideally speed up quickly. Then, when you rest, it should slow down quickly. It’s the same for your emotions. When something really tragic happens, it would be weird if you were still happy, right? Or if you just sat there with no reaction. When something tragic happens, you should be there with that pain, feeling that sadness. When something unjust happens, you should feel how aggravating it is. And then, after you’ve sat with those feelings for the appropriate amount of time—and it could be an hour, or a day, or months, depending on the severity of what happened—then, you can go back to a state of rest. Or joy. Or whatever. Being healed isn’t about feeling nothing. Being healed is about feeling the appropriate emotions at the appropriate times and still being able to come back to yourself. That’s just life.

Where does our need to accelerate time come from? From impatience to arrive in the near future into which we have projected our trifling desires. Our need to slow time down would surely be natural. But why this strong desire to speed things up? Why are we always in a hurry to reach the future?

Trails enabled me to better see the world, to notice fine aspects invisible from an airplane, the most basic things we miss. Seeing life at a pace at which you can actually observe nuance, the speed of stepping, the beautiful inspiring texture of “plain” reality becomes visible—God smiling in the detail.

Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.” “Snap ending.” Mildred nodded. “Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.” Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down. Beatty ignored her and continued: “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and jump again as she patted his pillow. Right now she was pulling at his shoulder to try to get him to move so she could take the pillow out and fix it nicely and put it back. And perhaps cry out and stare or simply reach down her hand and say, “What’s this?” and hold up the hidden book with touching innocence. “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

It must be one of life’s little jokes... how we take everything, even life itself, for granted. We waste our childhoods wishing for what we don’t have, longing for the future, dreaming of ways to speed the time so we can hurry up and see the world. And in our later years, we’d give anything just to slow things down and go back to what we once had.

The story of the rapper and the story of the hustler are like rap itself, two kinds of rhythm working together, having a conversation with each other, doing more together than they could do apart. It's been said that the thing that makes rap special, that makes it different both from pop music and from written poetry, is that it's built around two kinds of rhythm. The first kind of rhythm is the meter. In poetry, the meter is abstract, but in rap, the meter is something you literally hear: it's the beat. The beat in a song never stops, it never varies. No matter what other sounds are on the track, even if it's a Timbaland production with all kinds of offbeat fills and electronics, a rap song is usually built bar by bar, four-beat measure by four-beat measure. It's like time itself, ticking off relentlessly in a rhythm that never varies and never stops. When you think about it like that, you realize the beat is everywhere, you just have to tap into it. You can bang it out on a project wall or an 808 drum machine or just use your hands. You can beatbox it with your mouth. But the beat is only one half of a rap song's rhythm. The other is the flow. When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow cops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch. The flow isn't like time, it's like life. It's like a heartbeat or the way you breathe, it can jump, speed up, slow down, stop, or pound right through like a machine. If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow. Just like beats and flows work together, rapping and hustling, for me at least, live through each other. Those early raps were beautiful in their way and a whole generation of us felt represented for the first time when we heard them. But there's a reason the culture evolved beyond that playful, partying lyrical style. Even when we recognized the voices, and recognized the style, and even personally knew the cats who were on the records, the content didn't always reflect the lives we were leading. There was a distance between what was becoming rap's signature style - the relentlessness, the swagger, the complex wordplay - and the substance of the songs. The culture had to go somewhere else to grow. It had to come home.

Often, the answer to a problem or dilemma is not immediately obvious, and we simply don’t know what to do next. As we mentioned earlier, a problem cannot be solved at the same level of thinking in which it was created; we need a shift in our level of understanding. This logic reminds us that if we do not know the answer to a specific problem, recycling the same information over and over usually will not produce a solution. It will, however, keep our minds busy and speeded up. It will create stress. We’ve all had the experience of being stuck in “thought quicksand,” where our mental struggling sucks us deeper into our analytical thinking. This is an example of the misuse of the analytical thought process.

He wishes that time was a matter of choice. That you could live your life controlling the metronome __ speed it up sometimes, but mostly slow it down.

All the time he was growing up, the only thing he wanted was for life to speed up, and now all he wants is for it to slow down. For the clocks to stop, for Maya never to grow up.

The sad truth is, John and I and the kids only took Route 66 once on our trips to Disneyland. Our family, like the rest of America, succumbed to the lure of faster highways, more direct routes, higher speed limits. We forgot about taking the slow way. It makes you wonder if something inside us knows that our lives are going to pass faster than we could ever realize. So we run around like chickens about to lose our heads. Which makes our little two- or three-week vacations with our families more important than ever... As for the time that elapsed between those vacations, that’s another thing altogether. It seems to have all passed breathlessly, like some extended whisper of days, months, years, decades. (pp.39-40)

It seems that life is all about timing. Sometimes the timing is perfect for something you want, and the events come together perfectly. It’s at those times when you think life couldn’t get any better. Opportunities are presented to you, and you make the right decisions at the right times. You feel as if your life is gaining speed. Then suddenly, it seems that the universe changes. You’ve stepped out of the flow, or time has sped up or slowed down. You try to make things happen even though the timing is wrong, and it’s like you’re swimming upstream.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.

The glow lasted through the night, beyond the bar's closing, when there were no cabs on the street. And so Mathilde and Lotto decided to walk home, her arm in his, chatting about nothing, about everything, the unpleasant, hot breath of the subway belching up from the grates. 'Chthonic', he said, booze letting loose the pretension at his core, which she still found sweet, an allowance from the glory. It was so late, there were few other people out, and it felt, just for this moment, that they had the city to themselves. She thought of all the life just underfoot, the teem of it that they were passing over, unknowing. She said, 'Did you know that the total weight of all the ants on Earth is the same as the total weight of all the humans on Earth.' She, who drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true, there was so much relief in the evening. When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous bolder blocking their future had rolled away. 'They'll still be here when we're gone,' he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he'd be sozzeled. 'The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches, they will be the kings of the Earth.'... 'They deserve this place more than we do,' she said. 'We've been reckless with our gifts.' He smiled and looked up. There were no stars, there was too much smog for them. 'Did you know,' he said, 'they just found out just a while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.' ...She felt a sting behind here eyes, but couldn't say why this thought touched her. He saw clear through and understood. He knew her. The things he didn't know about her would sink an ocean liner. He knew her. 'We're lonely down here,' he said, 'it's true, but we're not alone.' In the hazy space after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped like spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they draw near, casting off blue sparks, new stars until they spin past each other, and then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined, never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss, and then at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

People say that things like this happen in slow motion, as though you suddenly become an astronaut in the antigravity chamber of your own life. This wasn't true for me. Things were speeding up instead, and I did my best to slow them down in my mind.

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.

In 2012, I turned fifty-six. Hugh and his longtime girlfriend took me out to dinner. On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore—probably you’ve heard it—about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old. When I was a teenager, I looked at over-fifties with pity and unease: they walked too slow, they talked too slow, they watched TV instead of going out to movies and concerts, their idea of a great party was hotpot with the neighbors and tucked into bed after the eleven o’clock news. But—like most other fifty-, sixty-, and seventysomethings who are in relative good health—I didn’t mind it so much when my turn came. Because the brain doesn’t age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there’s a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days. (I was spared that, at least, because most of my so-called good old days had been spent as a full-bore, straight-on-for-Texas drug addict.) I think for most people, life’s deceptive deliriums begin to fall away after fifty. The days speed up, the aches multiply, and your gait slows down, but there are compensations. In calmness comes appreciation, and—in my case—a determination to be as much of a do-right-daddy as possible in the time I had left. That meant ladling out soup once a week at a homeless shelter in Boulder, and working for three or four political candidates with the radical idea that Colorado should not be paved over.

You used to doubt what you had perceived, but never what others invented. You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm: you could stop, speed up, or slow down; go backward or jump into the future. As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.

Owing to the corner pick-up stops required in any case by buses, the short signal frequencies interfere with bus travel time less than long signal frequencies. These same shorter frequencies, unstaggered, constantly hold up and slow down private transportation, which would thereby be discouraged from using these particular streets. In turn, this would mean still less interference and more speed for buses.

When Isak died Peter thought he would be left numb, but instead it was as if all his pores opened up, so that the air itself started to hurt. His chest can be ripped open by a single unhappy glance from either of the children, particularly his daughter. All the time he was growing up, the only thing he wanted was for life to speed up, and now all he wants is for it to slow down. For the clocks to stop, for Maya never to grow up.

The new normal is rarely an easy adjustment and never truly feels, well, normal. Let’s be honest. Plan B is never preferred. Detours and alternate routes are never quite as scenic. The darkness of being gifted a second chance is that it means something went wrong in the first place. And yet, I would rather have a few speed bumps slow me down, causing me to spill coffee on my dress, than ever hand someone else the keys to my life.

Meanwhile, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) arises from different midbrain/brain-stem nuclei that project down the spine to the body. In contrast to the SNS and the four Fs, the PNS is about calm, vegetative states. The SNS speeds up the heart; the PNS slows it down. The PNS promotes digestion; the SNS inhibits it (which makes sense—if you’re running for your life, avoiding being someone’s lunch, don’t waste energy digesting breakfast).

And there was the moon. A warm and visible greeting, a beacon of relief. Full, unshrouded, its edges crisp. It looked like an airy wafer- what were those crackers that came in the big green tin? She stared at the moon and thought about the fact that she was breathing. Fact of breathing, fact of life. This she could control: slow down and speed up her breathing, despite the pain in her throat. She'd never really looked at the moon, never really seen how intricate the etchings on its yellowy silver surface. Bowl of a spoon in candlelight. When she'd looked a long time- I see the moon, and the moon sees me- a glimmering ring like a rainbow materialized at the rim. In the memory she still retained, as clear as a framed snapshot, a portrait worn in a locket, Saga stared at the moon that way for hours, and it kept her company, it kept her sane, it kept her in one piece, it kept her alive. It was proof, fact, patience, faith.

The essence of my case is this: given the fast pace of modern life, most of us tend to react too quickly. We don’t, or can’t, take enough time to think about the increasingly complex timing challenges we face. Technology surrounds us, speeding us up. We feel its crush every day, both at work and at home. Yet the best time managers are comfortable pausing for as long as necessary before they act, even in the face of the most pressing decisions. Some seem to slow down time. For good decision-makers, time is more flexible than a metronome or atomic clock.

It’s possible to search in vain for that point where your running feels “just right.” As I considered the point of balance for myself, I was reminded of a quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. He wrote: “Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.

you’re dead set on creating explosions that a crematory operator would hear and would definitely be freaked out by, don’t leave unpopped popcorn in your body. Instead, try leaving a pacemaker in your body. (Note: I one-thousand-percent do not recommend doing this. I’m making a joke. See, I can make jokes too, Tim.) A pacemaker helps living people control their heartbeat, speeding up the heart if needed, slowing the heart down if needed. It’s a cute lil’ thing, the size of a small cookie, that is basically a battery, generator, and some wires implanted (through surgery) into the body. It can save your life if your heart is misfiring. But if a pacemaker is not removed from a dead body before the cremation, it can turn into a tiny bomb.

Thus the course of life is nothing but a race toward death, a race in which no one may stand still or slow down even for a moment, but all must run with equal speed and never-changing stride. For to the short-lived as to the long-lived, each day passes with unchanging pace. . . . On the way to death the man who takes more time travels no more slowly, even though he covers much more ground.113 The interchangeability of life’s beginning and end lets life itself appear to be no more than a mere distance stripped of any qualitative significance. Existence itself loses its autonomous meaning, which can only be extension in time. Once we assume the perspective that we no longer view life as “before death” but as “after death,” death equalizes by devaluing life as such.

Slow me down, Lord. Ease the pounding of my heart by the quieting of my mind. Steady my hurried pace with a vision of the eternal reach of time. Give me, amid the confusion of the day, the calmness of the everlasting hills. Break the tensions of my nerves and muscles with the soothing music of the singing streams that live in my memory. Teach me the art of taking minute vacations—of slowing down to look at a flower, to chat with a friend, to pat a dog, to smile at a child, to read a few lines from a good book. Slow me down, Lord, and inspire me to send my roots deep into the soil of life’s enduring values, that I may grow toward my greater destiny. Remind me each day that the race is not always to the swift; that there is more to life than increasing its speed. Let me look upward to the towering oak and know that it grew great and strong because it grew slowly and well.

To boost bonding among others so they are more apt to work (or play) well together, ask them, when together, to do two powerfully simple things that can be done rather quickly: 1. Write down the ways they are like each other. Hint: Create a level playing field. Writing rather than immediately sharing helps slow thinkers keep up with fast thinkers. Fast thinkers aren't smarter, just different in their thinking processes, and each kind has advantages and pitfalls, so they can accomplish more together than when a majority in a group think and speak at the same speed. Hint: Salespeople are often fast thinkers. 2. Share with each other what they wrote, going around the circle, one by one. Bonus benefit: Other studies show that when you reflect on how you are similar to those with whom you are talking, you pay more attention to them. You care about them more. That spurs the other person to listen more closely to you.

You are told from the moment you enter school that time is constant. It never changes. It is one of those set things in life that you can always rely on... much like death and taxes. There will always be sixty seconds in a minute. There will always be sixty minutes in an hour. And there will always be twenty-four hours in a day. Time was not fluctuating. It moved on at the same, constant pace at every moment in your life. And that was the biggest load of crap that I'd ever been taught in school. Truth was, time did fluctuate. It was easy to lose hours or even days in a blink of an eye. Other times, it was a struggle to get through a mere hour. It ebbed and flowed as relentlessly as the tides, and just as powerfully too. The moments that you wanted to last forever were the ones that were washed away all too soon. The moments that you wanted to speed up, were slowed down to a snail’s pace. That was the truth of the matter.

It's never going to stop,’ Malenfant whispered. ‘It will consume the Solar System, the stars—’ This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually— ‘The future has gone,’ Malenfant said. ‘My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...’ That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. ‘Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—’ Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble. There. Can you see that? It's already starting... ‘What is?’ The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum—remnants of our universe—isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like— ‘Like black holes.’ And in that instant, Malenfant understood. ‘That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.’ Much better. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores. ‘And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?...’ We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes—universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining—and many, many of them will harbor life and mind. ‘But we were the first.’ Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind—the first intelligence of all—had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind. We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children—the maligned Blues—and we put it right. This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it. We were parents of the universe, not its children.

It was one of those rare moments where one has a vision of the scope of the wild ocean. Not just small cylinders firing to keep a tiny engine running, but rather the giant, massive gears of nature, each one with its own reasoning, its own meta-logic, spinning in its particular circle in competition or in confluence with the gear below it. We zeroed in on the school, but our progress was painfully slow, It would have been foolish to speed into the tumult-we would have ruined our baits in the process and doomed our chances of hooking a tuna. But luckily, the commotion did not subside. If anything it only grew more frantic and exhuberant on our approach. Beneath the birds, beneath the dolphins, beneath the menhaden, there should have been an equally vast school of giant bluefin tuna, collaborating with vertebrates of the so-called higher orders of life to form the floor of the prey trap, sealing the baitfish in from below, while the dolphins and birds made up the trap's walls and ceiling. A strike from a giant tuna seemed inevitable.....as the boat moved forward, I saw seabirds gathering up ahead into a cloud, the size and violence of which I had never seen before. Gannets - big, albatross-like pelagic birds - flew hundreds of feet above the churning surface of the water. In a flock of many thousands, they whirled in unison and then, as if on command from some brigadier general of bird life, dropped in an arc, bird after bird, into the water beneath. The gyre of gannets turned in a clockwise direction, and down below, spinning counterclockwise, was the largest school of dolphins I'd ever seen. There in the angry blue-green sea, the dolphins had corralled a vast school of menhaden-small herringlike creatures that, when bitten, release globules of oil that float on the surface. Oil slicks flattened the water everywhere as the dolphins swirled around, using their exceptional intelligence and wolf-pack cooperation to befuddle and surround the fish, which in turn whirled in a clockwise direction.

Rather, productivity is about making certain choices in certain ways. The way we choose to see ourselves and frame daily decisions; the stories we tell ourselves, and the easy goals we ignore; the sense of community we build among teammates; the creative cultures we establish as leaders: These are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive. We now exist in a world where we can communicate with coworkers at any hour, access vital documents over smartphones, learn any fact within seconds, and have almost any product delivered to our doorstep within twenty-four hours. Companies can design gadgets in California, collect orders from customers in Barcelona, email blueprints to Shenzhen, and track deliveries from anywhere on earth. Parents can auto-sync the family’s schedules, pay bills online while lying in bed, and locate the kids’ phones one minute after curfew. We are living through an economic and social revolution that is as profound, in many ways, as the agrarian and industrial revolutions of previous eras. These advances in communications and technology are supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, they often seem to fill our days with more work and stress. In part, that’s because we’ve been paying attention to the wrong innovations. We’ve been staring at the tools of productivity—the gadgets and apps and complicated filing systems for keeping track of various to-do lists—rather than the lessons those technologies are trying to teach us. There are some people, however, who have figured out how to master this changing world. There are some companies that have discovered how to find advantages amid these rapid shifts. We now know how productivity really functions. We know which choices matter most and bring success within closer reach. We know how to set goals that make the audacious achievable; how to reframe situations so that instead of seeing problems, we notice hidden opportunities; how to open our minds to new, creative connections; and how to learn faster by slowing down the data that is speeding past us.

Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm [...]. [...] Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending. [...] Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet [...] was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: "now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors". Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more. [...] Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought! [...] School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts? [...] The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour. [...] Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang, boff, and wow!

At the Pace of What Is Real Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. —SENG-TS'AN Like most people I know, I struggle with taking too much on, with doing too many things, with moving too fast, with overcommitting, with overplanning. I've learned that I must move, quite simply, at the pace of what is real. While this pace may vary, life always seems vacant and diminished when I accelerate beyond my capacity to feel what is before me. It seems we run our lives like trains, speeding along a track laid down by others, going so fast that what we pass blurs on by. Then we say we've been there, done that. The truth is that blurring by something is not the same as experiencing it. So, no matter how many wonderful opportunities come my way, no matter the importance placed on these things by others who have my best interests at heart, I must somehow find a way to slow down the train that is me until what I pass by is again seeable, touchable, feelable. Otherwise, I will pass by everything—can put it all on my résumé—but will have experienced and lived through nothing.

Those groans men use passing a woman on the street or on the steps of the subway to tell her she is a female and their flesh knows it, are they a sort of tune, an ugly enough song, sung by a bird with a slit tongue but meant for music? Or are they the muffled roaring of deafmutes trapped in a building that is slowly filling with smoke? Perhaps both. Such men most often look as if groan were all they could do, yet a woman, in spite of herself, knows it's a tribute: if she were lacking all grace they'd pass her in silence: so it's not only to say she's a warm hole. It's a word in grief-language, nothing to do with primitive, not an ur-language; language stricken, sickened, cast down in decrepitude. She wants to throw the tribute away, dis- gusted, and can't, it goes on buzzing in her ear, it changes the pace of her walk, the torn posters in echoing corridors spell it out, it quakes and gnashes as the train comes in. Her pulse sullenly had picked up speed, but the cars slow down and jar to a stop while her understanding keeps on translating: 'Life after life after life goes by without poetry, without seemliness, without love.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal about me wearing the engagement ring,” Shay said to Michael from behind the wheel of his Range Rover. Before he had a chance to respond, she shifted from reverse to drive and shot out of the parking lot. Straight into oncoming traffic. “Shay, watch out for . . . ” He trailed off, his heart in his throat as she expertly avoided being creamed by another speeding SUV. With his hand still gripping the door and his foot pressed on the floor as if he could somehow miraculously slow the vehicle down, Michael said, “Obviously the ring is a big deal to you or you wouldn’t be trying to kill me.” “Being aggressive will save you. Being cautious, that’s what’ll kill you.” “No doubt you’ll live to be a hundred and ten, then.” He relaxed when the speedometer needle inched down toward a more reasonable speed. “I’m taking it that your life lesson only refers to driving; otherwise you would’ve been applauding my efforts at the club.” She glanced at him, a smile tipping up the corner of her mouth. “So, you actually choked on purpose to cozy up to Costello’s hired henchman and disrupted the dancer’s performance so the bouncers would haul you to Kozack’s office?” He ignored everything else but the part that would get him an answer to his earlier question. “I choked because you took my breath away, and—” She laughed. “Either you’re easily impressed or you don’t get out to many strip clubs. Kozack was going to fire me even before he found me in his office.” “Neither is true, but you didn’t let me finish. As incredible as you looked doing what you were doing on that pole, I choked because I saw the engagement ring on the chain around your neck.” He leaned across the console and slid his hand beneath her leather jacket. Her skin was like satin, and he could smell her warm, floral scent. The temptation to press his face to the tender spot between her shoulder and neck almost overwhelmed him. It was one of his favorite places to kiss her. One of her favorite places to be kissed.

-1 PETER 5:3 Over and over I have attempted to be an example by doing rather than telling. I feel that God's great truths are "caught" and not always "taught." In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses (the author) says the following about God's commandments, statutes, and judgments: "You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up" (6:7). In other words, at all times we are to be examples. It is amazing how much we can teach by example in every situation: at home, at the beach, while jogging, when resting, when eating-in every part of the day. It's amazing how often I catch our children and grandchildren imitating the values we exhibited in our home-something as little as a lighted candle to warm the heart, to a thank you when food is being served in a restaurant. Little eyes are peering around to see how we behave when we think no one is looking. Are we consistent with what we say we believe? If we talk calmness and patience, how do we respond when standing in a slow line at the market? How does our conversation go when there is a slowdown on Friday evening's freeway drive? Do we go by the rules on the freeway (having two people or more in the car while driving in the carpool lane, going the speed limit, and obeying all traffic signs)? How can we show God's love? By helping people out when they are in need of assistance, even when it is not convenient. We can be good neighbors. Sending out thank you cards after receiving a gift shows our appreciation for the gift and the person. Being kind to animals and the environment when we go to the park for a campout or picnic shows good stewardship. We are continually setting some kind of example whether we know it or not. PRAYER Father God, let my life be an example to those around me, especially the little ones who are learning the ways of faith. May I exhibit proper conduct even when no one is around. I want to be obedient to Your guiding principles. Thank You for Your example. Amen.

You need to make sure you always have a reserve of willpower available for the on-the-fly decision making and controlling your reactions. If you run your willpower tank too low, you’ll end up making poor choices or exploding at people. The following are some ways of making more willpower available to you: --Reduce the number of tasks you attempt to get done each day to a very small number. Always identify what your most important task is, and make sure you get that single task done. You can group together your trivial tasks, like replying to emails or paying bills online, and count those as just one item. --Refresh your available willpower by doing tasks slowly. My friend Toni Bernhard, author of How to Wake Up: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide to Navigating Joy and Sorrow, recommends doing a task 25% slower than your usual speed. I’m not saying you need to do this all the time, just when you feel scattered or overwhelmed. Slowing down in this way is considered a form of mindfulness practice. --Another way to refresh your willpower is by taking some slow breaths or doing any of the mindfulness practices from Chapter 5. Think of using mindfulness as running a cleanup on background processes that haven’t shut down correctly. By using mindfulness to do a cognitive cleanup, you’re not leaking mental energy to background worries and rumination. --Reduce decision making. For many people, especially those in management positions or raising kids, life involves constant decision making. Decision making leeches willpower. Find whatever ways you can to reduce decision making without it feeling like a sacrifice. Set up routines (like which meals you cook on particular nights of the week) that prevent you from needing to remake the same decisions over and over. Alternatively, outsource decision making to someone else whenever possible. Let other people make decisions to take them off your plate. --Reduce excess sensory stimulation. For example, close the door or put on some dorky giant headphones to block out noise. This will mean your mental processing power isn’t getting used up by having to filter out excess stimulation. This tip is especially important if you are a highly sensitive person.

RAIN IN MEASURED AMOUNTS Another item of information provided in the Qur'an about rain is that it is sent down to Earth in "due measure." This is mentioned in Surat az-Zukhruf as follows: It is He Who sends down water in measured amounts from the sky by which We bring a dead land back to life. That is how you too will be raised [from the dead]. (Qur'an, 43:11) This measured quantity in rain has again been discovered by modern research. It is estimated that in one second, approximately 16 million tons of water evaporates from the Earth. This figure amounts to 513 trillion tons of water in one year. This number is equal to the amount of rain that falls on the Earth in a year. Therefore, water continuously circulates in a balanced cycle, according to a "measure." Life on Earth depends on this water cycle. Even if all the available technology in the world were to be employed for this purpose, this cycle could not be reproduced artificially. Even a minor deviation in this equilibrium would soon give rise to a major ecological imbalance that would bring about the end of life on Earth. Yet, it never happens, and rain continues to fall every year in exactly the same measure, just as revealed in the Qur'an. The proportion of rain does not merely apply to its quantity, but also to the speed of the falling raindrops. The speed of raindrops, regardless of their size, does not exceed a certain limit. Philipp Lenard, a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1905, found that the fall speed increased with drop diameter until a size of 4.5 mm (0.18 inch). For larger drops, however, the fall speed did not increase beyond 8 metres per second (26 ft/sec).57 He attributed this to the changes in drop shape caused by the air flow as the drop size increased. The change in shape thus increased the air Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an 113 resistance of the drop and slowed its fall rate. As can be seen, the Qur'an may also be drawing our attention to the subtle adjustment in rain which could not have been known 1,400 years ago. Harun Yahya Every year, the amount of water that evaporates and that falls back to the Earth in the form of rain is "constant": 513 trillion tons. This constant amount is declared in the Qur'an by the expression "sending down water in due measure from the sky." The constancy of this quantity is very important for the continuity of the ecological balance, and therefore, life.

Within our own species we have great variation between these two reactions. One man may beat his life away in furious assault on the barrier, where another simply waits for the tide to pick him up. Such variation is also observable among the higher vertebrates, particularly among domestic animals. It would be strange if it were not also true of the lower vertebrates, among the individualistic ones anyway. A fish, like the tuna or the sardine, which lives in a school, would be less likely to vary than this lonely horned shark, for the school would impose a discipline of speed and uniformity, and those individuals which would not or could not meet the school’s requirements would be killed or lost or left behind. The overfast would be eliminated by the school as readily as the over-slow, until a standard somewhere between the fast and slow had been attained. Not intending a pun, we might note that our schools have to some extent the same tendency. A Harvard man, a Yale man, a Stanford man—that is, the ideal—is as easily recognized as a tuna, and he has, by a process of elimination, survived the tests against idiocy and brilliance. Even in physical matters the standard is maintained until it is impossible, from speech, clothing, haircuts, posture, or state of mind, to tell one of these units of his school from another. In this connection it would be interesting to know whether the general collectivization of human society might not have the same effect. Factory mass production, for example, requires that every man conform to the tempo of the whole. The slow must be speeded up or eliminated, the fast slowed down. In a thoroughly collectivized state, mediocre efficiency might be very great, but only through the complete elimination of the swift, the clever, and the intelligent, as well as the incompetent. Truly collective man might in fact abandon his versatility. Among school animals there is little defense technique except headlong flight. Such species depend for survival chiefly on tremendous reproduction. The great loss of eggs and young to predators is the safety of the school, for it depends for its existence on the law of probability that out of a great many which start some will finish. It is interesting and probably not at all important to note that when a human state is attempting collectivization, one of the first steps is a frantic call by the leaders for an increased birth rate—replacement parts in a shoddy and mediocre machine.

Elvis was pretty slick. Nonetheless, I knew that he was cheating. His four-of-a-kind would beat my full house. I had two choices. I could fold my hand and lose all the money I’d contributed to the pot, or I could match Elvis’s bet and continue to play. If a gambler thought he was in an honest game, he would probably match the bet thinking his full house was a sure winner. The con artist would bet large amounts of money on the remaining cards, knowing he had a winning hand. I narrowed my eyes and pursed my lips, as if struggling to decide whether to wager five hundred pesos or fold my hand and call it quits. I knew there were five men between me and the door and watched them from the corner of my eye. Even if I folded and accepted my losses, I knew they would not let me leave without taking all my cash. They had strength in numbers and would strong arm me if they could. The men stared, intently watching my next move. I set down my beer and took five one hundred peso notes from my wallet. The men at the bar relaxed. My adrenaline surged, pumping through my brain, sharpening my focus as I prepared for action. I moved as if to place my bet on the table, but instead my hand bumped my beer bottle, spilling it onto Elvis’ lap. Elvis reacted instinctively to the cold beer, pushing back from the table and rising to his feet. I jumped up from my chair making a loud show of apologizing, and in the ensuing pandemonium I snatched all the money off the table and bolted for the door! My tactics took everyone by complete surprise. I had a small head start, but the Filipinos recovered quickly and scrambled to cut off my escape. I dashed to the door and barely made it to the exit ahead of the Filipinos. The thugs were nearly upon me when I suddenly wheeled round and kicked the nearest man square in the chest. My kick cracked ribs and launched the shocked Filipino through the air into the other men, tumbling them to the ground. For the moment, my assailants were a jumble of tangled bodies on the floor. I darted out the door and raced down the busy sidewalk, dodging pedestrians. I looked back and saw the furious Filipinos swarming out of the bar. Running full tilt, I grabbed onto the rail of a passing Jeepney and swung myself into the vehicle. The wide-eyed passengers shrunk back, trying to keep their distance from the crazy American. I yelled to the driver, “Step on the gas!” and thrust a hundred peso note into his hand. I looked back and saw all six of Johnny’s henchmen piling onto one tricycle. The jeepney driver realized we were being pursued and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. The jeepney surged into traffic and accelerated away from the tricycle. The tricycle was only designed for one driver and two passengers. With six bodies hanging on, the overloaded motorcycle was slow and unstable. The motorcycle driver held the throttle wide open and the tricycle rocked side to side, almost tipping over, as the frustrated riders yelled curses and flailed their arms futilely. My jeepney continued to speed through the city, pulling away from our pursuers. Finally, I could no longer see the tricycle behind us. When I was sure I had escaped, I thanked the driver and got off at the next stop. I hired a tricycle of my own and carefully made my way back to my neighborhood, keeping careful watch for Johnny and his friends. I knew that Johnny was in a frustrated rage. Not only had I foiled his plans, I had also made off with a thousand pesos of his cash. Even though I had great fun and came out of my escapade in good shape, my escape was risky and could’ve had a very different outcome. I feel a disclaimer is appropriate for those people who think it is fun to con street hustlers, “Kids. Don’t try this at home.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head. . . but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz. . . not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-​night diner down around Rockaway Beach. There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip. Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out. . . thirty-​five, forty-​five. . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these. . . and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything. . . then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-​five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board. Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly -- zaaapppp -- going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea. The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil-​slick. . . instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-​inch notices in the paper the next day: “An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway I.” Indeed. . . but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-​burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes. But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right. . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it. . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica. . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge. . . The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

In being slower, time is more capacious. The event is only in the moment. By speeding through life with technology, you reduce what any given moment can hold. By slowing down, you expand it.

Slowing down our minds helps us to speed up our progress.

Why on Earth would you slow a book down though? Interestingly enough, listening to books at half speed is a great way to fall asleep. Your mind will slowly drift off as the speed of your internal monologue starts to match the dialogue of the slower book. There are very few times in this book where I will advocate you messing with your senses as profoundly as I am here, but I truly believe that you can master your content overload by using your attention and time to get the most out of what technology has to offer.

Connectivity is one thing; constant connectivity is another. . . . Constant connectivity can be a curse, encouraging the lesser angels of our nature. None of the nine Muses of classical times bore the names Impatience or Distraction. Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity. We can't interrupt them; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them. They are the expression of an individual or a group of individuals, not of a hive mind or collective consciousness. They speak to us thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else's. You can rant against a book, scribble in the margin, or even chuck it out the window. Still, you won't change the words on the page. The technology of a book is genius: the order of the words is fixed, whether on the page or on-screen, but the speed at which you read them is entirely up to you. Sure, this allows you to skip ahead and jump around. But it also allows you to slow down, savor, and ponder.

A domesticated life like that would never make me happy. I lived my life just the way I was behind the wheel, always going at full speed. Instead of slowing down and avoiding my obstacles, I liked to swerve out of the way and hope for the best.

Once, just west of Framingham on the Worcester Turnpike or Route 9 in Massachusetts, I caught a ride in a truck that had worn brakes. The driver, a jolly red-nosed individual with a white beard who could have passed as Santa Claus, suggested that I might want to get out considering the situation regarding the truck’s brakes. Not wanting to turn down a ride in the middle of the night, I rode it out with the driver. Going uphill was all right, but coming down was decidedly hairy. The driver knew what he was doing and used his engine to slow himself down, but he had to depend on his emergency brake if he wanted to, or had to, stop. At one traffic light, which was on a downhill slope, he couldn’t bring his rig to a stop and just blew through the intersection, horn blowing, weaving past the cross traffic. I hung on enjoying the excitement as the driver narrated his moves, as if he was telling a story. I watched and listened to him, too caught up in this wild ride to get concerned about the danger. There were a number of downgrades where he totally lost control of our speed, but fortunately the upgrade would slow us down again. He relied on his loud air horn, which sounded even louder in the dark of night. Fun was fun and eventually we got to Worcester, where I was glad to get off in one piece. I hope that he got his load to where it was going, but I knew that the farther west on Route 9 he went, the more mountainous the terrain would become and I didn’t want any part of that. Besides, this was where I needed to get off. My next leg would take me through Sturbridge and then on to Connecticut. .

the lane to my left wasn’t as far back as I thought. The very last inch of my back bumper caught the very front corner of the truck’s cab. That was enough. I lost all control of my car, which executed a slow and stately counterclockwise turn, ending with my driver’s side flush into the front of the truck, still speeding down the freeway. It was slow and stately from my perspective, anyway. I felt as if I were trapped in amber, watching helplessly as my car moved of its own

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow. But

In our secular world, we no longer see eternal paradise as a carrot at the end of the stick of life, but try to cram as much as possible into our relatively short time on the planet instead. This is, of course, a futile endeavour, doomed to failure. It is tempting to interpret the modern epidemics of depression and burnout as the individual's response to the unbearable nature of constant acceleration. The decelerating individual - who slows down instead of speeding up, and maybe even stops completely - seems out of place in a culture characterised by manic development, and may be interpreted pathologically (i.e. diagnosed as clinically depressed).

Future destinations in our solar system neighborhood include potential probe missions to a few moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune -- mainly by virtue of them being possible candidates for life, with their large oceans buried beneath icy crusts, plus intense volcanic activity. But getting humans to explore these possibly habitable worlds is a big issue in space travel. The record for the fastest-ever human spaceflight was set by the Apollo 10 crew as they gravita­tionally slingshotted around the Moon on their way back to Earth in May 1969. They hit a top speed of 39,897 kilo­meters per hour (24,791 miles per hour); at that speed you could make it from New York to Sydney and back in under one hour. Although that sounds fast, we've since recorded un-crewed space probes reaching much higher speeds, with the crown currently held by NASA's Juno probe, which, when it entered orbit around Jupiter, was traveling at 266,000 kilometers per hour (165,000 miles per hour). To put this into perspective, it took the Apollo 10 mission four days to reach the Moon; Opportunity took eight months to get to Mars; and Juno took five years to reach Jupiter. The distances in our solar system with our current spaceflight technology make planning for long-term crewed explora­tion missions extremely difficult." "So, will we ever explore beyond the edge of the solar system itself? The NASA Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched back in 1977 with extended flyby missions to the outer gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 even had flyby encounters with Uranus and Neptune -- it's the only probe ever to have visited these two planets. "The detailed images you see of Uranus and Neptune were all taken by Voyager 2. Its final flyby of Neptune was in October 1989, and since then, it has been traveling ever farther from the Sun, to the far reaches of the solar sys­tem, communicating the properties of the space around it with Earth the entire time. In February 2019, Voyager 2 reported a massive drop off in the number of solar wind particles it was detecting and a huge jump in cosmic ray particles from outer space. At that point, it had finally left the solar system, forty-one years and five months after being launched from Earth. "Voyager 1 was the first craft to leave the solar system in August 2012, and it is now the most distant synthetic object from Earth at roughly 21.5 billion kilometers (13.5 billion miles) away. Voyager 2 is ever so slightly closer to us at 18 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) away. Although we may ultimately lose contact with the Voyager probes, they will continue to move ever farther away from the Sun with nothing to slow them down or impede them. For this reason, both Voyager crafts carry a recording of sounds from Earth, including greetings in fifty-five differ­ent languages, music styles from around the world, and sounds from nature -- just in case intelligent life forms happen upon the probes in the far distant future when the future of humanity is unknown.

I’ve been so committed to prove (as though anyone cares) that I can handle it all. And I’ve handled a whole lot of things. I’ve had babies and lost babies and written books and spoken at events and run races and hosted all manner of showers and dinners and parties. I’ve done so many things. And I’m so tired. I miss my friends. I sleep terribly. I snap at my kids more than I want to, and then I lay in bed at night feeling guilty about it. I spend more time asking my husband for help with the dishes or the kids than I do asking him about his life and dreams and ideas. Who wins, then? I handled it all! I showed them! But who is “them”? Who cares? Whose voice am I listening to? What am I trying to prove? What would happen, what would be lost, if I stopped, or if I slowed down to a pace that felt less like a high-speed chase all day, every day?

in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, I looked around us... This was, I realised the only time in my life the world had truly slowed down. A terrible tragedy had forced us to do it - but there was also, for many of us, a hint of relief. It was the first time in centuries that the world chose, together, to stop racing, and pause. We decided as a society to value something other than speed and growth. We literally looked up and saw the trees. I suspect that, in the long run, it will be ultimately not be possible to rescue attention and focus in a world that is dominated by the belief that we need to keep growing and speeding up every year. ...we will, sooner or later, have to take on this very deep issue: the growth machine itself. But we will have to do this in any event - for another reason. The growth machine has pushed humans beyond the limits of our minds - but is also pushing the planet beyond its ecological limits. And these two crises, I was coming to believe are intertwined.

Admittedly, sometimes on the road of life we’re preoccupied with getting to the next destination. We watch for speed traps, get miffed at other drivers, and monitor the vehicle’s performance. Sometimes we get distracted by a billboard, slow down to see the wreckage of someone else’s accident, or take our eyes off the road to watch an eagle swoop over a canyon lake. But our deepest need on

Admittedly, sometimes on the road of life we’re preoccupied with getting to the next destination. We watch for speed traps, get miffed at other drivers, and monitor the vehicle’s performance. Sometimes we get distracted by a billboard, slow down to see the wreckage of someone else’s accident, or take our eyes off the road to watch an eagle swoop over a canyon lake.

RAIN IN MEASURED AMOUNTS Another item of information provided in the Qur'an about rain is that it is sent down to Earth in "due measure." This is mentioned in Surat az-Zukhruf as follows: It is He Who sends down water in measured amounts from the sky by which We bring a dead land back to life. That is how you too will be raised [from the dead]. (Qur'an, 43:11) This measured quantity in rain has again been discovered by modern research. It is estimated that in one second, approximately 16 million tons of water evaporates from the Earth. This figure amounts to 513 trillion tons of water in one year. This number is equal to the amount of rain that falls on the Earth in a year. Therefore, water continuously circulates in a balanced cycle, according to a "measure." Life on Earth depends on this water cycle. Even if all the available technology in the world were to be employed for this purpose, this cycle could not be reproduced artificially. Even a minor deviation in this equilibrium would soon give rise to a major ecological imbalance that would bring about the end of life on Earth. Yet, it never happens, and rain continues to fall every year in exactly the same measure, just as revealed in the Qur'an. The proportion of rain does not merely apply to its quantity, but also to the speed of the falling raindrops. The speed of raindrops, regardless of their size, does not exceed a certain limit. Philipp Lenard, a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1905, found that the fall speed increased with drop diameter until a size of 4.5 mm (0.18 inch). For larger drops, however, the fall speed did not increase beyond 8 metres per second (26 ft/sec).57 He attributed this to the changes in drop shape caused by the air flow as the drop size increased. The change in shape thus increased the air resistance of the drop and slowed its fall rate. As can be seen, the Qur'an may also be drawing our attention to the subtle adjustment in rain which could not have been known 1,400 years ago. Every year, the amount of water that evaporates and that falls back to the Earth in the form of rain is "constant": 513 trillion tons. This constant amount is declared in the Qur'an by the expression "sending down water in due measure from the sky." The constancy of this quantity is very important for the continuity of the ecological balance, and therefore, life.

General attitude and outlook—the way we perceive and experience anything—is more influenced by our physical state than anything other single factor. I’d guess that for most of us, at least 50% of our struggles and discontent are brought on by being physically out of balance. The causes of that imbalance are many, but at the core, there’s an insensitivity or inability to locate and maneuver essential physical processes within us: how to breathe, how to sit, stand and walk, how to see and hear, how to slow down or speed up, how to relax, how to sleep, how to eat, how to adjust our physiological responses to the different circumstances we find ourselves within. This kind of removal or abstraction from our physicality causes an enormous amount of problems on many levels. One key result of it is a distrust in our own ability to influence our emotional state and our energy and perspectives in general; we often feel that we can’t get our hands on the control switches, as if most of life just happens and we can’t do much about it.

Ooching, in short, should be used as a way to speed up the collection of trustworthy information, not as a way to slow down a decision that deserves our full commitment. 3

A nagging focus on time management makes us want to increase the speed of our lives. Maintaining a focus on priority management helps us recognize the need to slow down. When our use of time is built around well-defined priorities, life is less a question of how much we can get done and more a question of whether something is worth doing at all.

When the world gets too loud and seems to move too fast, I slow down my inner world and look deep into the natural caverns of myself and swim in the cooling waters which lay waiting for me to wade deeply in. I sip of honeyed dew drops with my heart beat slowing down, my pulse calming and becoming tranquil. I no longer am a part of the massive world of eternal speed and endless flirtations with chance and hazardous circumstance. I have become a quiet observer to the natural order of reality and life's boundless possibilities. This lets me know that I have reached a point of understanding more than mortality but also immortality. I can feel the drops of warm rain bouncing off my skin and the birds squawking in the background seeking to fly in the endless sky between the multicolored droplets of eternity. ~ WordPaintings

All of us are busy. Life isn't slowing down, it's speeding up, and our Daytimers reflect the fact. Yet that is precisely why we need to take time to pray.

When the world gets too loud and seems to move too fast, I slow down my inner world and look deep into the natural caverns of myself and swim in the cooling waters which lay waiting for me to wade deeply in. I sip of honeyed dew drops with my heart beat slowing down, my pulse calming and becoming tranquil. I no longer am a part of the massive world of eternal speed and endless flirtations with chance and hazardous circumstance. I have become a quiet observer to the natural order of reality and life's boundless possibilities. This lets me know that I have reached a point of understanding more than mortality but also immortality. I can feel the drops of warm rain bouncing off my skin and the birds squawking in the background seeking to fly in the endless sky between the multicolored droplets of eternity. ~ WordPaintings © 2015 Levon Poe

May God who gives patience…and encouragement help you to live in complete harmony with each other.… —Romans 15:5 (TLB) HOLY SATURDAY: LIVING IN HARMONY Depending on which source you consult, Americans spend forty-five minutes to an hour each day waiting: waiting in lines, waiting for files to download, sitting in traffic…waiting. If you ever spy me waiting in traffic, I look patient. I am not. My demeanor masks a very angry man who is contemplating mayhem. I once sat in my car in a highway construction zone on a hot summer afternoon beside a flashing sign that read, SLOW DOWN! YOUR CURRENT SPEED IS 0 MILES AN HOUR. I thought the long wait might cause overheating and then a blown gasket—and I don’t mean the car. It takes a special kind of person to be given a life of unfathomable gifts (food, drink, leisure time, central air) and then complain about occasional delays in living that life. I could, for instance, spend that time enjoying music or praying or pondering my existence rather than pondering mayhem, but no. I have chosen to seethe. Meanwhile, somewhere a child waits for rice from the back of a UN truck. A mother waits for a husband missing in Afghanistan. A couple waits for word about an adoption. A young man in a faraway time waits for the welcome death to end His suffering, accompanied by nothing but two thieves and vinegar mixed with some gall. Lord, I realize that’s what I have: gall. To grumble with such pettiness takes a lot of gall. Perhaps I’ve found something else to ponder the next time I await Your return when I have lost sight of You. —Mark Collins Digging Deeper: Ps 27:14; Mi 7:7

He’d figured out the body, so now it was on to the brain. Specifically: How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors’ backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you’d ever be hassled for going too fast.

If the human race ever wishes to master time travel then the answer is through chemical and not mechanical means. Speed is time travel. It will pilfer away at the space-time around you without your consent, propelling you forward through time. The human body is a vehicle of flux. It is exhilarating to move rhythmically, pulsing, stepping through pockets of your existence in fluid motions. The time that speed steals from you, it gives back with interest, cold and hard on a Monday morning. It brings with it a terrifying despair that creeps upon you. It is a black, slow-motion suicide. The ceiling begins to drip and ooze grey-brown sludge. Aural hallucinations, the demons of psychosis, speak wordless words of pure dread... Sometimes I would laugh and giggle hysterically at inane nonsensical stories that would play out in my mind. I would watch them unfold, like a lucid dream, weird images, Boschian forms, twisted nightmares... And I would weep. I would weep for nothing with salty tears, rivers of anguish and existential pain running down my face, dripping quietly onto the carpet. Day after day, I would unravel myself, dissect, and analyse my life over and over until I was exhausted and insane. Speed is not an insightful drug. It will not delude you into a false sense of spirituality like hallucinogens. It is the aftermath and the come down from speed that will rip open your ego and show you the bare, horrible bones of yourself. It will open the beautiful black doorway inside you and it will show you nothing. Through the darkness of internal isolation, the amphetamine comedown will show you no god, no spirituality, no soul, just your own perishable flesh, and your own animal self-preservation. It will show you clearly just how ugly you really are inside. In the emptiness of yourself, there is only the knowledge of your eventual death. When you have truly faced yourself and recognised yourself as purely animal then you become liberated from the societal pretence that you are above or better than any other creature. You are a human animal. You are naturally motivated to be selfish. Everything you do, every act you partake of, is in its essence an act of survival. No act of the human-animal happens without the satisfaction of the ego’s position in existence…

Slowing Down to the Speed of Life by Richard Carlson and Joseph Bailey.

The new normal is rarely an easy adjustment and never truely feels, well, normal. Let's be honest. Plan B is never preferred. Detours and alternate routes Are never quite as scenic The darkness of being gifted a second chance Is that it means something went Wrong in the first place. And yet, I would rather have a few speed bumps slow me down, causing me to spill coffee on my dress, than ever hand someone the keys to my life.

Time cannot be slowed down. Either ride with it or increase your speed to get there much faster.

How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors’ backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you’d ever be hassled for going too fast. That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle—behold, the Running Man.

What people are saying about WAR EAGLES ​5 out of 5 stars! WW2 with a dash of fantasy! I really enjoyed stepping back in time as the race for air travel was developing. One could truly feel the passion these pilots and engineers had for these magnificent machines. The twist of stepping back into a land of Vikings and dinosaurs was very well executed. Well done to both the author and the narrator. ​ Reminiscent of Golden Age Sci Fi This audio book reminded me of some of the 40's and 50's era tales, but what it happens to be is an alternative timeline World War II era fun adventure story. Think of a weird mash-up of a screw-up Captain America wanna-be mixed with the Land of the Lost mixed with Avatar where Hitler is the real villain and you might come close. At any rate, it's load of good fun and non stop action. But don't get distracted for a minute or you'll miss something! There are american pilots, Polish spies, Vikings, giant prehistoric eagles and, of course, Nazis! What more could you ask for to while away an afternoon? Our hero even gets the (Viking) girl! Put your feet up an get lost in what might have been.... 4 out of 5 stars! it's Amelia Earnhart meets WWII This is not an accurate historical fiction book, but rather an action-packed book set an historical time. I normally listen to my books at a higher speed, however the amount of drama and action in this book I had to slow it down. I like the storyline and the narrator however, the sound effects throughout the book did kind of throw me since I'm not used to that and most audible books. still I would recommend this is a good read.​ 5 out of 5 stars! I Would Like to See this on the Silver Screen Back in the late 1930s, the director of King Kong started planning War Eagles as his next block buster film. Then World War II intervened and the project languished for decades. It helps to know this background to fully appreciate this novel. It’s a big cinematic adventure waiting to find the screen. The heroes are larger than life, but more importantly, the images are bigger and more vivid than the mighty King Kong who reinvented the silver screen. And what are those images you may ask? Nazis developing super-science weapons for a sneak attack on America, Viking warriors riding gargantuan eagles in a time-forgotten land of dinosaurs, and of course, those same Vikings fighting Nazis over the skyline of New York City. This book is a heck of a lot of fun. It starts a little bit slow but once the Vikings enter the story it chugs along at a heroic pace. There is a ton of action and colorful confrontations. Narrator William L. Hahn pulls out all the stops adding theatrical sound effects to his wide repertoire of voices which adds a completely appropriate cinematic feel to the entire story. If you’re looking for some genuinely heroic fantasy, you should try War Eagles. Wonderful story War Eagles is a really good adventure story. ​5 out of 5 stars!

I stop thinking anything at all. I launch myself at Adrian. I throw myself at him, scratching and punching and hitting. ‘My daughter, my baby,’ I hear myself screaming over and over again. My nails pull away flesh on his cheeks, my fingers pull out a chunk of hair and the car swerves all over the road. The noise of other cars hooting fills my head and Adrian speeds up as he tries to lift his arms to fend off my attack. Blood trickles down the side of his face, thick and red. He turns to me, his eyes show real fear. He is looking at me as though he has discovered a wild animal inside his car. He’s right. I am all animal now, I am the mother lion and I am attacking the man who hurt my cub. He slams on the brake, veering the car sideways. The wheezing scream of his brakes invade my ears as they jolt the car to a full stop in the middle of the road. I take a deep breath because my lungs have run out of air and turn to look at him, just as another car comes straight for us, hitting us on the driver-side door. There is no slowing down of those last few moments, no watching of my life passing before my eyes. Instead the car hits us at exactly the same time our car stops. The smell of burning rubber seeps in through my window as smoke from desperate brakes fills the air. I catch a glance of the driver as his car hits us. His mouth is open as he screams, shock and despair written across his face. I feel, rather than hear, the crunch of metal and the shattering of glass. Then I hear noise everywhere. I think I am screaming and there are other screams and then lights and then I close my eyes. I need to get out of the car, I think, but I need a minute. I just need a minute.

There are moments in life that speed up too fast, go by more quickly than we want--the last moments of a painted sky at sunset before darkness comes, the final purr of a cat drifting off to sleep, the contagious laugh of a loved one. But then there are moments that slow down despite us wanting them to go away.

You might recall that one of my early adult insights about wonder came by studying the philosophical book the Siva Sutras. This philosophy references a Sanskrit name for that subtle space between two thoughts, two actions, or two breaths. It is called unmesa, and in this tradition when you contemplate this space, you might glimpse the nature of consciousness—for a second. In this breathing practice, you keep your attention on the pause between your easeful exhalation and your easeful inhalation. I invite you to think of this practice this way: When you exhale and your heartbeat slows down, you expel what was no longer flourishing. You let go. When you inhale and your heartbeat speeds up, you take in the possibility of this moment, a breathing in of what could be. Breathe out: Who were you? Pause. Breathe in: Who could you become? Breathe out: What was? Pause. Breathe in: What could be?

All Hadza women dig, but grandmothers dig more than mothers in part because they don’t have to nurse or spend as much time taking care of little ones. According to measurements by Kristen Hawkes and colleagues, a typical Hadza mother forages about four hours a day, but grandmothers forage on average five to six hours a day.18 On some days they dig less and spend more time collecting berries, but overall they work longer hours than mothers do. And just as grandmothers spend about seven hours every day foraging and preparing food, grandfathers continue to hunt and to collect honey and baobab fruits, traveling just as far on most days as younger men do. According to the anthropologist Frank Marlowe, “Old men are the most likely to fall out of tall baobab trees to their deaths, since they continue to try to collect honey into old age.”19 How many elderly Americans dig several hours a day, let alone climb trees and hunt animals on foot? We can, however, compare how much Americans and Hadza walk. A study of thousands found that the average twenty-first-century woman in the United States aged eighteen to forty walks 5,756 steps a day (about two to three miles), but this number declines precipitously with age, and by the time they are in their seventies, American women take roughly half as many steps. While Americans are half as active in their seventies as in their forties, Hadza women walk twice as much per day as Americans, with only modest declines as they age.20 In addition, heart rate monitors showed that elderly Hadza women actually spent more of their day engaged in moderate to vigorous activity than younger women who were still having children.21 Imagine if elderly American women had to walk five miles a day to shop for their children and grandchildren, and instead of pulling items off the shelves, they had to dig for several hours in hard, rocky soil for boxes of cereal, frozen peas, and Fruit Roll-Ups. Not surprisingly, hard work keeps elderly hunter-gatherers fit. One of the most reliable measures of age-related fitness is walking speed—a measure that correlates strongly with life expectancy.22 The average American woman under fifty walks about three feet per second (0.92 meter per second) but slows down considerably to two feet per second (0.67 meter per second) by her sixties.23 Thanks to an active lifestyle without retirement, there is no significant age-related decline in walking speed among Hadza women, whose average pace remains a brisk 3.6 feet per second (1.1 meters per second) well into their seventies.24 Having struggled to keep up with elderly Hadza grandmas, I can attest they maintain a steady clip even when it is blisteringly hot. Older Hadza men also walk briskly.

Nevertheless, ‘stick lightly’ they must, as ‘possessions, situations and people’ will keep slipping away and vanishing at a breathtaking speed whatever they do; whether they try to slow them down or not is neither here nor there. ‘Let them go’ they must (though, unlike Bill Gates, with hardly any pleasure), but whether they do it graciously or with a lot of wailing and teethgnashing is beside the point.

One of the most fascinating and unexpected findings was the role of wind in a tree’s life. Before reaching maturity, many trees in the biosphere snapped under their own weight. Researchers learned later this was caused by lack of stress wood—a wood that forms in place of normal wood as a response to external forces. This necessary mechanical acclimation was lacking in the biosphere trees, preventing them from surviving. There’s an underlying principle at work here. Stress creates resilience. Lack of stress creates weakness. In the case of the biosphere trees, the stress they were missing was wind. Wind doesn’t just blow in one direction, or at one speed. It’s constantly changing directions, slowing down, speeding up—creating an infinite array of forces for the trees to counterbalance against. Ironically, the lack of varied movement and counterforce is what felled the trees. p.151