The return
With our lifestyles developing into a fast race, the yearn for slowness becomes so noisy it becomes hard to ignore it anymore.
Almost as if our bodies were whispering to us: “I’m overheating. Please, take it slower. Don’t you see I’m not built for this speed?”
As it was explained in the book “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker, there is a tendency to disassociate our selves from our bodies and travel to the fast and infinite world of possibilities because that’s easier than to acknowledge the many difficulties you need to go through in the slow and present moment.
It’s like willingly neglecting that our selves are attached to a body.
Not only this body is limited, unlike the world of possibilities which is unlimited.
This body interacts at a more natural pace with its environment, meaning, in a slower fashion.
Its possibilities are confined to its immediate surroundings and its needs must be attended now, not sometime in the future.
What are your options then? How can you take things slower?
Return back to your body.
I mean, where else can your self ultimately return back to? Can your self live at another home address independently from where your body is located at?
Let’s explore how the creative in you can take advantage of its superpowers to enjoy a better life through a slower approach.
The fantasy about possibilities
Returning back to your body and acknowledging its natural and slower speed to experience life raises a concern.
For instance, one of the concerns I myself have is: “If I stop focusing on the many possibilities out there, would I not be preventing myself from enjoying all of those opportunities?”
The truth about that as far as I am concerned, is that in focusing so desperately to live in all of those possibilities, you neglect that possibility which you are currently living, namely: now.
I know that from experience.
If I’m not careful, I would wonder in all of those possibilities which are located far into an imaginary future, always thinking about what could be and not about what is.
Very often I have this nagging feeling that I need to do everything fast in order to fulfill the infinite possibilities awaiting for me, most often at the expense of my own wellbeing and that of those I love.
Just ask my wife.
She is quick to scold me (lovingly, at least some times) when I spend too much time speeding through my days, reminding me it’s okay and necessary to go at a slower and more natural pace.
There are two implications that hold truth in my wife’s scold:
Firstly: it will be humanly impossible to enjoy all of those possibilities.
So one might be better off by accepting the fact that no matter how hard you try or how fast you accomplish certain things, there will always be many other things, possibilities, left to do.
Secondly, it seems the issue is reduced to a matter of quality, not quantity.
Not to how many push ups you can do at the gym, but how well you do the few ones you can actually do.
Not to how many guitar songs you can learn to play but to how well you play the ones you learn.
Not to how many places you can visit, but to how much you get to enjoy the ones you do visit.
Slow but effective
By no means is this a critique to the idea of quantity and its importance in our everyday life.
After all, your wallet might look very nice with that one dollar bill in it, but I bet it will look even nicer with other few hundreds dollar bills in it.
It’s more of a critique to the notion on placing blindly all the priority on quantity, and thus sacrificing quality. In wanting more, more, more and forgetting about better, better, better.
The slower route of quality seems to have this positive multiplying effect on everything.
Through quality, those few possibilities that we are able to experience, become more fulfilling and end up producing better, and sometimes even more results in the long term.
This makes pursuing quality extremely efficient because through fewer things you are able to extract more benefits.
This in turn can become the building blocks for something else even bigger or better (for more on the benefits of striving for quality, read “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout” by Carl Newport.”).
Fewer but better quality push ups will help you to develop faster the strength to do more push ups in the future.
Learning to play very well a few guitar songs will help you to learn faster and better the fundamental notes needed to learn many other songs.
Taking the time to fully explore the places you visit will provide you a better sense of fulfillment compared to visiting many places and not fully exploring them.
Therefore, the sometimes disproportionate desire for more is reduced to its natural size when you pursue a higher degree of quality rather than quantity.
This leaves us with the question: how can I bring myself from the world of infinite possibilities back to my body in order to purse the slower path of quality?
The secret advantage of creatives
Among the different options you could try in order to bring your self back to your body, you might want to choose to cultivate the heart of the creative.
It is true that the inner world of creatives can be overwhelming and chaotic, after all, they are able to take in more of life, others, and themselves due to their sensitivity.
Such amount of data could destroy anyone if they don’t have the proper filters to organize and make sense of the information.
This apply to unhealthy creatives as well.
From there the tight correlation between the mind of a creative and the mind of a mad person: the mad person did not figure out how to manage the information.
You might be wondering why in the world would you or anyone for that matter want to cultivate the heart of a creative then? Who wants to go mad on purpose?
The answer to your question is that there are certain, let’s call them, tactics, the creatives use consciously or instinctively in order to manage the vast amount of information they take in, to make the most out of it, and to enhance their life experience.
These tactics could answer at least to some extent the question on how to bring the self back to your body and acknowledge a more natural pace of living by pursuing a higher degree of quality.
The “first love” effect
It is easier to be amazed when you first experience something. Everything is new, fresh, and interesting, like the first love.
Time moves slower and nothing else matters because you are fully engaged in the now.
But what happens after you experience it more than once, or maybe, many other times?
The magic quickly wears off.
Now you feel the urge to move on to the next thing in order to experience that same intoxicating feeling once again.
This can launch anyone into a frenetic search for that first love in the abstract world of possibilities, where things are not, but could be.
The problem with such hunt is that it has a tendency to make you forget that it is necessary for your own wellbeing, to cultivate the first love effect within your present situation.
Otherwise, you might disregard what you have at the moment as something of lesser value, when in fact, it might already be valuable and all you can possibly need.
Instead of finding yourself constructing the life or the experience you want, you will find yourself in a state of perpetual destruction.
Although is true that sometimes in order to build something you first need to destroy, it is also true that at some point you need to stop destroying and start, and more importantly, keep, building.
The issue then arises, how do I start and keep building when I’m no longer in love with it?
Each person is a different world. But if after some reflection, you arise to the logical conclusion that in fact, whatever that is, is valuable, then you might consider cultivating the fist love effect.
Which would take us to the question of how do you do that?
The answer: to get to know more about it, whatever it might be.
It is not strange to like someone you just met, but to not truly be in love with them immediately. After all, you don’t know her well enough.
Getting to know something more in depth allows you to cultivate that first love effect multiple times over.
You can start seeing things that seemed to never exist before, the intricacies, and the beauty of all the elements that makes it what it is.
You can think of it as rediscovering the same thing over and over again.
The more you know something, the more you can appreciate it.
The way creative people do this might be different than others, in that they do this from a more technical approach, although not always.
For instance, my wife and I, both visual artists, can’t help ourselves but wonder how that other artist achieved that cool effect on that painting.
For someone else that cool effect might well be an irrelevant splash of colors.
But because my wife and I know first hand the challenges artists have to go through in order to achieve certain results in their artwork, we find value in that splash of colors and have a higher degree of appreciation.
In your case, you could start by learning about the story behind whatever it might be, the why it came to be what it is.
You might want to experience other aspects of it more fully. Maybe you could spend more time with it, or in it.
Or simply get to know some important facts about it.
In other words: set the goal to get to know deeper that which you understand is valuable about or in your life, so you can cultivate that state of perpetual “first love” effect.
Naturally, this will help you to take things slower and increase the quality interaction you have with yourself and your surroundings, instead of finding yourself hoping from one thing to the other, from one person to the other, from one dream to the other.
Zoom In. Zoom out.
I have no troubles whatsoever when it comes to big picture visualization.
Always described as someone that had his head in the clouds, it comes easy for me to dream big and far beyond the current immediacies.
My wife, on the other hand, is the opposite.
She is very detailed oriented and always attentive to those things I normally disregard as “minor things” (to which she is quick to remind me: “Yes, but they are important.”).
Although it is true that many times this difference causes friction when discussing certain projects, events, or just talking about life, it is also true that it has many advantages.
While looking at the big picture allows someone to get a grasp of the main things quickly, it could prevent them from noticing the smaller things which give shape to the bigger things.
On the other hand, always focusing on the small things can prevent someone from seeing the main things that give life and things their purpose.
So it would be a good practice for anyone to be able to zoom in and zoom out from time to time.
In doing so, different aspects of the same thing will be noticed, and therefore, the appreciation of it becomes more wholesome.
For instance, my wife and I recently went to El Yunque National Forest here in Puerto Rico, and there were times where we were fascinated by the inmensity of the forest and its rivers, and the ocean view from the top of the high mountains.
You could say that in those instances we were zooming out.
However, many other times we were amazed at the little stuff, like a gang of snails stuck to the wall of an abandoned cabin in the corner of the road, or a beautiful looking rock, or the roots of a tall tree.
At those moments you could say we were zooming in.
Needless to say, we both left the forest with an immense appreciation for nature and its majesty.
Maybe you have been stuck in just one zoom modality for a long time now, so you feel you have already noticed most of what was there to be noticed.
Normally, boredom is what comes out of this situation.
However, I am sure you are forgetting there are other aspects awaiting to be discovered and that you won’t notice them until you slow down and take the time to zoom in or zoom out.
If you have ever wondered how creatives can get so much inspiration from the same or very similar subjects, that’s why: they are constantly zooming in and out on their subject of interest.
Naturally, this practice will force you to slow down and take the time to fully experience your own existence and that of others with a higher degree of quality.
Transmutation
It’s my belief that there is some sort of energy exchange between our inner worlds and that of the outside, or at least there should be one.
There is this book, called the “Go-Giver” by Bob Borg and John David Mann, in which the mentor of the main character asks him to breath in. But the guy cannot keep breathing in infinitely, so right when he is about to exhale, the mentor asks him to keep breathing in regardless.
Desperately, the main character exhales all the air accumulated in his lungs.
The mentor then goes on to explain that in life you have the right not only to take from the world, but to give back. And that such exchange is as natural and necessary as it can come.
Giving too much can hurt you, but does so taking too much.
I mentioned that the inner world of creatives can be quite chaotic and overwhelming due to the amount of information, or energy, they take in from the world.
However, the way healthy creatives balance their chaotic inner world is by giving back to the world in the form of, for instance, a work of art.
That’s their attempt to allow the energy to flow naturally from one end to the other without hogging all the energy to themselves and in the process hurting them for an excess of energy.
This exhale of energy balances out the forces from within.
The energy flow was, in other words, transmuted: from being one thing, to becoming another.
This could be an exercise you could try yourself: transmute some of the energy that weighs in you, and make something out of it.
I am not a phycologist or anything of the sort, but I believe some of our worries, anger, and anxieties, are nothing else but an excess of energy which we have been holding up to and not let go of.
If we take the time to find a medium which can allow us to transmutate that excess energy, then we would feel more in balance with ourselves.
Art is not the only medium you can use for this purpose, but within the arts you will find a lot of options to choose from.
This transmutation of energy basically screams at you to stop hurrying through life and slow down so you can make something out of that energy you are keeping all to yourself, let it be sadness, happiness, hate, love, loneliness…
As I mentioned, is not always about more and more, but better and better.
Not about more energy flow, but better energy flow: quality over quantity.
Conclusion
In our fast-paced world, the frantic rush to explore endless possibilities often pushes us to ignore the present in favor of an uncertain future.
The lie that we can live in the infinite possibilities traps us in a cycle of perpetual dissatisfaction.
Thus making us overlook the value of our natural pace and immediate needs presented in our current reality.
The constant pursuit of what could be, rather than what is, deprives us of fully experiencing the present.
The key lies in embracing the moment, recognizing the inherent value in our current circumstances, and striving for quality over sheer quantity.
Adopting a creative mindset offers a way to reconnect with our bodies and the present moment.
Creatives manage to transform their overwhelming inner chaos into meaningful expressions, balancing the intake and outflow of energy.
This process of transmutation allows for a healthier, more fulfilling engagement with life.
By slowing down, focusing on the details, and appreciating the beauty in the mundane, we can cultivate a perpetual "first love" effect, deepening our connection to our surroundings and enhancing our overall quality of life.
This shift from more to better invites a richer, more satisfying existence, rooted in the present and attentive to the nuances of our immediate world.