Life Has a Speed Limit. Are You Sticking to It?

I finally got Covid last week – life’s way of stopping me in my tracks. I’m counting myself blessed that it wasn’t too bad. It did, however, bring everything in my life to a grinding halt. And a week of barely having the energy to get off the couch, let alone do ALL the things!, certainly gave me the opportunity to reflect on how much doing I tend to fill my days with.

When confronted with an abundance of forced down time, it became extremely clear to me how difficult I find it to be still. Resting, moving slowly, allowing myself to be “unproductive” are unfamiliar practices in my daily life – ones that are going to require deliberate attention to cultivate.

What does down time look like for you? Is it something you even have access to? Can you pinpoint time in your week that isn’t filled with activities or chores or obligations? And if you can, do you feel guilty about taking that time? If so, you’re not at all alone in that, my friend.

I’d kind of love to blame TikTok or Twitter or any of the social media platforms for the ways in which our days and nights are now brimming over with too much to do. Or, maybe it’s smartphones. Or, maybe it’s the internet. It’s almost definitely a combination of capitalism and the patriarchy. 

I do know that we weren’t really built for this level of distraction and activity, and we’re all just muddling our way through the reality of the world we’ve created. And many of us aren’t too hot at it.

We get bombarded with messaging and images that we’re supposed to be able to do all the things, be all the things. We’re supposed to have a great job and a house and a family and still be able to exercise regularly and take care of ourselves and cook healthy meals and go on awesome vacations. But that’s actually a hell of a lot to ask of ourselves, and sounds to me like a recipe for burnout.

Maybe We’re Not Meant to Fill Our Time

Life can be a lot like luggage. Regardless of the size of the suitcase, we’re pretty likely to fill it. Whatever available space we have, we fill. The problem, of course, is that when it comes to our time and energy, there isn’t a bigger suitcase. So, unless we’re being mindful, we try to cram way too much into our carryon and then end up surprised when it bursts at the seams. 

There are a lot of reasons why this happens. Sometimes we’re driven by the whip of not-good-enough; we believe that if we just do more/better/faster we’ll finally get that monster off our back. Sometimes we’re driven by economic necessity – with inflation, the cost of living, the ways that our economic system has failed us, working harder is the only way to achieve the comfort of financial security. Sometimes it’s FOMO; sometimes it’s workaholism; sometimes it’s just that we don’t even realize that we aren’t meant to cram every second of every day with productivity or striving or accomplishing shit.

We are meant to rest. We are meant to daydream. We are meant to be bored sometimes. It’s just easy to forget that when there’s so much out there with which to distract ourselves.

We Can Slow Down Before We Have to Stop

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with a friend about my tendency to try and plow through things – the way I metaphorically spend my life going from zero to seventy and then have to slam on the brakes or have them slammed for me when I hit a wall. This is true in so many areas of my life (though thankfully not my actual driving). 

With the 24-hour news cycle and the constant stimulation of social media and instant gratification culture, it’s really hard for a lot of us to slow down. We get the messaging that we’re supposed to go, go, go. That if we’re not posting to social media several times a day, we’re falling behind. That if we haven’t already got the house, the job, the partner, the LIFE, that we’re doing something wrong. 

We get so few messages about slowness, about stillness, about the ways that achieving shit takes a lot of time and effort and patience. We forget that life is a marathon, not a sprint. And we go around sprinting and sprinting and sprinting, and then collapsing because we’ve pushed ourselves too hard for too long.

Burnout is real. And it’s pervasive. And it shows up in work, for sure, but also in relationships, in housekeeping, in the never-ending slog of working on ourselves. All of it has a limit, and most of us aren’t really paying attention to what those limits are.

Pushing Harder or Going Faster Isn’t the Solution

When things get difficult, I know I’m prone to wanting to push harder. I want to find THE thing I’m supposed to do to FIX IT. If I just do enough EMDR sessions, I can get to the other side of trauma and just be happy, right? (Wrong). If I just put a profile up on four different apps and go on enough first dates this month, I’ll find someone suitable, right? (Wrong). If I just hunker down and work longer hours and get through the work backlog that’s piled up on me, I’ll carve out space for myself, right? (Also, very wrong). 

I am not an expert on taking breaks. Being still is a huge struggle for me. I have learned (the hard ways) that not taking days off is harmful, and I’m usually pretty good about setting work aside on the weekends. I tend to then cram them full of social activities if I’m not being really mindful, but at least I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I can set work aside for a time.

But there is always a gap between our capacity and our desire. We may want to do all the things, but that doesn’t mean we’re able to. No amount of enthusiasm and good reasons can change the fact that there are only so many hours in the day. We need a bare minimum of seven hours of sleep. More likely we need eight or nine. And we ignore that at our peril.

We can’t show up well when we’re consistently running on half a tank. But it would also be great if we caught ourselves doing that before life has to step in and intervene, instead of trying to blaze down the highway of life at 70 miles an hour only to slam on the brakes when a stoplight appears. 

Life isn’t a freeway with onramps and offramps. At best, it’s a highway with stoplights and through traffic. But really, it’s probably more like a regular-ass street that we shouldn’t be trying to blast our way through. What if instead of trying to speed around at 50 or 60 or 70 miles an hour, we just chilled at 35? Maybe then when we approach the inevitable stop lights of life’s curve balls, it wouldn’t be quite so painful or dramatic to hit the brakes.

How to actually slow the fuck down and cultivate more space? Well, I’m gonna have to circle back to that in another post. For now, let’s all just try and take a deep breath and look at the speedometer of our lives and at least start thinking about how to dial it down a notch. Paying even just a bit more attention is a big step in the right direction.