Slow-Mo: Not a No-No

​This is perhaps not the best thing to admit in print, but lately I've found myself—dare I say it?—slo-o-o-o-o-o-w-w-w-w-ing down. And even though I've always been something of a go-go-go-getter, I think this new pace is a good thing.
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One of the more leisurely desk lunches of my newspaper career

For most of my working life, I toiled in a profession—journalism—where speed was not only valued, but required. At my newspaper job, editors handed out daily assignments in mid-morning, and stories were due by mid- to late-afternoon. The short span in between was a mad scramble of gathering and absorbing background information, lining up sources, conducting interviews and writing fast. All of this fueled by caffeine, adrenaline and—if there was time—a lunch hastily gobbled at my desk.
 
It was stressful, but thrilling—something like riding a motorcycle through a series of hairpin turns. Both undertakings require skill and extreme focus, and at the end, both result in the sublime satisfaction of pulling off the feat. Still, there are times when you just want to sit back in the saddle, put your feet up on the highway pegs and savor the ride.

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Just as I used to enjoy a leisurely cruise down country roads on my motorcycle, I found myself yearning for more slow-moving days in my whole life. Yet when I finally was able to step away from my fast-paced career and turn my attention to book-writing, collage-making, picture-taking and other gentler pursuits, I found it surprisingly hard to let myself slow down. Conditioned to keep an eye on the clock, I tried to impose time limits and deadlines on myself. Some days I still whipped through pages with newsroom-paced efficiency, but on days when I labored for hours on a single page—or paragraph, or sentence, or phrase—I beat myself up for being such a slug.
 
Finally, I realized my whip-cracking and artificial deadlines were doing me—and my creative work—no good. Writing and revising words, collecting and assembling images, composing and shooting photographs are all endeavors that sometimes just take as long as they need to take. Hurrying up may make me feel more productive, but it rarely makes the end result better. 

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​Or so I kept telling myself for quite some time before I fully accepted it as truth. Only now, four years after swerving out of the fast lane, am I starting to settle into a more measured pace. Sometimes I still have to check the impulse to scold myself when I dawdle over a chore I used to speed through in seconds. But more often now, I allow myself to stand at the window and stare at the trees for as long as I want, to sink onto the couch and read a magazine after completing a task instead of racing on to the next thing on my list, to take a walk and stop to examine a wildflower or chat with a neighbor.

As so often happens, now that I'm thinking about this subject, I'm stumbling across related articles everywhere. In an interview in The Writer's Chronicle, author William Least Heat-Moon had this to say about speed in creative undertakings:
         
In large part, excessive speed is likely an aspect of the current instant-gratification syndrome, and unwillingness to delay reward; but speed can also be a way of cutting down on the arduousness of the creative process. I don't believe that excellent writing comes easily to anyone. To draw out one's best means first demanding the best of one's abilities and then answering that demand for the time it requires.
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What's the rush?

​And in her blog, The Tangled Nest, author Lyanda Lynn Haupt muses on being more tortoise than hare. Rather than paraphrase her beautiful language, I encourage you to read the original.
 
However, I will share Haupt's bottom line:
 

The Pace of Creation is a mystery. It is different for all of us. And that's just fine.
 
Yes, it is. What's more, even the process of discovering one's true and rightful pace can be a lengthy process. So take your time. Or hurry up. Whichever suits you. But do it in your own time.

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