Taking the Long Way Around
We live in a society obsessed with productivity, with finding or creating hacks that get us from where we are to where we wish to be as fast as possible.
We fill quiet moments with noisy thoughts, free time with activities, exercise and travel to cram more information into our brains. I read a story about a woman who was so consumed with work, she could no longer feel her the sensations in her body, below her head. I don’t think she’s alone in living from the neck up.
Here’s what we miss out on when try to get from point A to B in the fast way possible:
The ability to wander, to wonder, to be present and in our bodies.
To take in the physical world and to know it with all of our senses.
To look up from our phones and around at the world, and into the faces of strangers, to imagine the lives of others
To ponder, without an agenda, the patterns in our lives, many of which are not made of up straight lines from point A to B.
It is true that we are rewarded for having the “right” answers. Good grades for having the right answers are turned into obsessions with getting into a “good” school, or getting a good job, recognition, money, status, fame.
Somewhere between getting from point A to B we become cogs in the machine, a machine not like the cars that we drive: Sleek and shiny and speedy, it takes us to our destination, but is indifferent to the lives of any living thing that is not fast enough to jump out of the way.
The machine is voracious. It devours our energy, our time, our creativity and our ability to think, and most importantly, to formulate questions such as: where is this hamster wheel of endless achievement and productivity taking us? Whom does it serve? Are there other ways we could use our energy, time and love?
To be able to entertain questions such as these requires we create a gap, or a void in our lives.
We need to cultivate liminal spaces, betwixt and between: free time, play without a goal, winners or losers, the ability to look up and around and get into our bodies, to return as it were to our senses, to think with our whole bodies.
In other words, we need to try taking the long way around, looking up and out and around, at a place slow enough to register what we witness, at a pace slow enough to connect to other people, our bodies, the physical world around us, and to know, and remember how feels to be a part of it all.
