Slow Down... Your JOY Depends on It

Slow Down… Your Joy Depends on It

We have become remarkably good at speeding life up.

Information arrives instantly.  Any type of food arrives at our door. Movies begin whenever we want them. Answers are available before we’ve even finished asking the question.

And somewhere along the way, we expect life to work the same way.

We want relationships to develop quickly, problems to resolve quickly, healing to happen quickly, and uncertainty to disappear quickly.

But people don’t work at internet speed.

A relationship needs time to develop trust. A child needs time to become confident. Healing needs time. Grief needs time. Even becoming comfortable with ourselves, is a process that unfolds slowly.

The contradiction: we spend so much of our lives trying to save time, yet spending time is the very thing that gives meaning to life.

Think about how often we rush through an ordinary moment because we’re focused on the next one.

We hurry through dinner because we have somewhere to go. We rush a conversation because we’re thinking about what comes next. We look forward to the weekend while barely experiencing Tuesday.

Then one day, we look back and realize those ordinary moments were the life we were hoping to get to.

Slowing down isn’t about becoming less productive, but rather about being present.  Life isn’t waiting for you somewhere in the future, it is happening while you’re reading this.

Conversations, relationships, children growing up, morning coffee, laughing, and private moments in the car.  These times don’t announce themselves as important, they simply happen, and then they go away.

Please slow down, because life is already moving way too fast.  

Your Joy depends on it.