Hack Slowness!

Speed will break things. Hack slowness then you will increase your inner capacity to notice more!

"He speaks so fast, I can't 2X him on YouTube," lamented a comment on Zoom chat in a webinar were a YouTuber was presenting his ideas at the speed of light. We live in a world that values speed.  Our employers wants us to be fast. So do the cars behind us on the highway. A million blogs teach us to hack speed so we can achieve more.

I used to think being slow was a waste of time. I wanted to know as much as I could about everything as fast as I could. So for the past few years I have been reading lots of books. In 2021 I have notes on 109 books I read. I was consuming information at blinding speed. Literally blinding, because I wasn't really noticing much. But an emptiness was creeping into my soul. I tried to quell the emptiness by feeding it more information. My inner self became like a blackhole always absorbing information, giving nothing away. The hoarding got heavy. Weighed down. So I switched to reading some philosophy, which can only be read slowly. 

A line from the philosopher Abraham Heschel stopped me in my tracks, "The sense of the ineffable." To be human is to be on a quest to understand the ineffable. We constantly push to try to understand what is beneath the surface, beyond our grasp. I sat and just pondered this idea of grasping the ineffable. Time slowed down. I wasn't maximizing my reading time. But I was deepening my soul. There was a shift in my consciousness. I was seeing the world in a different light. I wasn't merely watching the surfaces, but I was noticing the ineffable. My soul was shining a new light. I had turned from a blackhole to a star.

Hacking slowness is not about slowing down just to speed up again. Sometimes we think we will slow down on vacation and then come back to the real world to speed up. Hacking slowness is about slowing down for the sake of slowing down. Hacking slowness is about creating the inner capacity to notice more. Chronic speed will reduce our inner capacity to notice. If we are not careful we could break things.

Facebook started with the motto, "move fast and break things." The problem with this approach is that thought it pays off in the short term, in the long terms it backfires. Now the stock price is 70% down from its peak. Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that he missed to notice the importance of short form videos. Thanks TikTok! Facebook was fast. It does look like Facebook did break things, and one of the things was Facebook (sorry, Meta!)

How can slowing down help us to develop the inner capacity to notice more happen?

Barry Lopez is a travel writer and a memoirist he says "witness, not achievement is what I am after." To witness is to appreciate something that is beautiful. To witness is not just to watch. It is to ponder, to absorb. To beautify our soul. Slowing increases our inner capacity to notice and grows our soul.

Slow down. Notice something beautiful. A painting. A poem. A melody. A flower. A leaf. Then ponder. Don't let the world dictate your speed. Learn to be slow, then your soul will grow. You will shine your unique light into the world and the blind shall see.

Don't hack speed. Hack slowness!

Hello, World!