Slowing

I just re-read part of a book I love. I had to share some things about "slowing." This is not all word for word.
From The Life You've Always Wanted by John Ortberg

Chapter 5 The Unhurried Life - the practice of "Slowing"
John shares that he asked the wisest mentor he's ever known what he needed to do to be spiritually healthy. Long pause. "You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life," he said.

Imagine for a moment that someone gave you that perscription, with the warning that your life depends on it. Consider the possibility that your life does depend on it.
Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. Hurry can destroy our souls. Hurry can keep us from living well. As Carl Jung wrote, "Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil."

As we pursue spiritual life, we must do battle with hurry. The great danger is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of faith. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

The Disease: Hurry Sickness
We suffer from what has come to be known as "hurry sickness." One of the great illusions of our day is that hurrying will buy us more time.
Our world has become the world of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland; "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same plae. If you want to get somwhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Ironically all our efforts have not produced what we are after: a sense of what we might call "timefulness", a sense of having enough time. American society is rich in goods, but extremely time-poor. Many societies in the two-thirds world, by contrast, are poor in material possessions, by our standards, but they are rich in time. They are not driven or hurried. They live with a sense that there it adequate time to do what needs to be done each day.

Meyer Friedman defines hurry sickness as "above all, a continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time, frequently in the face of opposition, real or imagined from other persons." Hurry will keep us consumed by "the cares, and riches, and pleasures in life," as Jesus put it, and prevent His way from taking root in our hearts.

"Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while." Jesus urged his disciples to take time out. Folowing Jesus cannot be done at a sprint. If we want to follow someone, we can't go faster that the one who is leading.

This does not mean we will never be busy. Jesus often had much to do, but h never did it in a way that severed the life-giving connection between him and his father. He never did it in a way that interfered with his ability to give love when love was called for. He observed a regular practice of withdrawing from activity for the sake of solitude and prayer. Jesus was often busy, but never hurried.

Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.

If we have hurry sickness, we are haunted by the fear that there are just not enough hours in the day to do what needs to be done. We read, talk, and listen faster. (lots of examples here)
Despite all this rushing around, the hurry-sick person is still not satisfied. So out of the desperate need to hurry, we ifnd ourselves doing or thinking more than one thing a time.
Cluttered: the lives of hurry-sick people lack simplicity. They keep acquiring stacks of books and magazines and then feel quilty for not reading them. They cannot seem to get rid of stuff.
Life is cluttered when we are weighed down by the burden of all the things we failed to say "no" to. Then, comes the clutter of forgetting important dates, of missing appointments, of not following through.

Superficiality - If superficiality is our curse, then hurry is the spell. Depth always comes slowly.
Today we have largely traded wisdom for information. We have exchanged depth for breadth. We wnt to microwave maturity.

An inability to Love:. The most serious sign of hurry sickness is a diminished capacity to love. Love and hurry are fundamentally incompatible. Love always takes time, and time is one thing hurried people don't have. Hurried people cannot love. Lewis Grant suggests that we are afflicted with what he calls "sunset fatigue". Sunset fatigue is when we are just too tired, or too drained, or toopreoccupied, to love the people to whome we have made the deepest promises.
It has set in when you find yourself: -rushing when there is no reason to -with underlying tension that causes sharp words, or quarrels - you set up mock races (see who can take bath fastest) that are really about your need to get through it -with sense of a loss of gratitude and wonder -indulging in self-destructive escapes from danger (too much tv, etc.)

It is because it kills love that hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life. Hurry lies behind much of the anger and frustration of modern life. Hurry prevents us from receiving love from the Father or giving it to His children. that's why Jesus never hurried.

Curing the Hurry Sickness:
We cannot become unhurried on our own. We cannot achieve this alone. WE will have to enter a life of training. Practices for the hurry-sick : Slowing and Solitude

Slowing -Involves cultivating patience by deliberately choosing to place ourselves in positions where we simpy have to wait. Choosing long lines in stores, or slower lanes of traffic, not wearing a watch, etc.

The Need for Solitude: A more traditional practice is solitude. Jesus engaged in it frequently. Wise followers of Christ's way have always understood the necessity and benefit of solitude. It is, to quote an old phrase, the "furnace of transformation."
Solitude is the place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society that will otherwise relentlessly mold us.

The dangers to which we are most vulnerable are the ones that creep up on us, that are so much a part of our environment that we don't een notice them. Thomas Merton wrote taht the early church fathers placed such a premium on solitude because they considered society to be a shipwreck from which any sane peson must swim for his life. These people believed that to let oneself drift along passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.

"The press of busyness is like a charm, " Kierkegard wrote. "Its power swells..it reasches out seeking always to lay hold of ever younger victims so that childhood or youth are scarcely allowed the quiet and the retirement in which the Eternal may unfold a divine growth."

The truth is as much as we complain about it, we are drawn to hurry. It makes us feel important. I keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means we don't have to look too closely at the heart or life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness.

Solitude is the remedy for the busyness that charms. What is it exactly? What do we do when we practice solitude? The primary answer is, of course, Nothing. At its heart, solitude is primarily about not doing something. It means to refrain from society. We withdraw from conversation, from the presence of others, from noise, from the constant barrage of stimulation.
"In solitude," Henri Nouwen wrote, "i get rid of my scaffolding." Scaffolding is all the stuff we use to keep ourselves propped up, to convince ourselves that we are important or okay. No friends, no phone, no music, no books, no tv. to distract the mind. Just me and my sinfulness, my desire, or lack of desire for God.

Practicing solitude requires relentless perseverance. Must schedule it. Think about it in two categories. We need brief periods of solitude on a regular basis - preferably each day, even at intervals during the day. but we also need, at great intervals, extended periods of solitude.

At the end of the day, it can be helpful to review the day with God: to go over the events that took place, to see what he might want to say to us through them, and to hand any anxieties or regrets over to him. A great benefit of this is that we begin to learn from our days.
We also need extended time alone. One day a month or so.

One fo the great obstacles to extended solitude is that frequently it may feel like a waste of time. We are conditioned to feel that our existence is justified oly when we are doing something. But I believe this feeling comes also because our minds tend to wander. I used to think that i devoted a large block of time to praying, I should be able to engage in solid uninterrupted, focused prayer. But I can't. What i've come to realize over time, is that brief times of focused prayer interspersed with these wanderings is all my mind is capable of at this point. One day I hope to do better. I find consolation in the words of Brother Lawrence: "For many years I was bothered by the thought that I was failure at prayer. Then one day I realized I would always be a failure at prayer, and I've gotten along much better ever since."

It is time to enter training for another way to live. We must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives!