Savoring The Slow

My favorite way to start the day is slowly. And early. I love watching the sun rise and listening to the neighborhood wake up while I drink my morning coffee. I love reading or writing as my first thing while my dog snoozes nearby after his breakfast. It’s my version of a golden hour.

Slow mornings never happen every day. I’ve been taking them for years now, and a good week usually means I get a one more slow morning than the rushed ones. Sometimes they look like savoring coffee. Sometimes they are an early morning run when the streets are still quiet. Either way, they happen at the pace I chose. A pace that says, I have all day for the other stuff.

Starting the day at your own pace feels like a luxury. But I see it as a way I can protect some of my time. The world is always rushing to get things done. It’s easy to get swept away in the productivity current if you stand close enough to let the pull drag you in. It’s a place where we worry more about being busy than being effective.

There was a few months where every single one of my mornings got to be a slow one. A lovely, golden hour for myself. It happened last year, during the few months that the world was moving more slowly too. That time was a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But the slow pace I got to live for those months was a luxury, and I loved it. I knew it was only a brief moment in time while it was happening. So I savored it like my morning coffee.

Our calendars are crowded and over-scheduled. We don’t have enough hours in the day to do what we want with our time, but we pile on more things anyway. We say yes, then stress ourselves out knowing that we might let someone down when we can’t follow through how we said we would. Somewhere in our overcommitted minds, we forget that no is an option too.

We fall asleep exhausted with to-do lists still a mile long. Our sleep isn’t nearly enough to feel rested. Then we wake up already rushing, just so we can feel like we fell short and let other people down again tomorrow. It’s really no wonder we often wish for more hours in the day.

We say we want the extra time so that we can use it for ourselves. So we can get healthier and treat our bodies better. So we can write that book or learn to play that instrument we’ve wanted to learn since we were in high school. But if our days had 30 hours, how would you really spend all that extra time? 

Would you actually sleep longer each night? Would you cook your own dinners and pack healthy lunches? Or would you hit the drive thru again as you rush between those four extra meetings on your calendar? Would you actually protect any of that time for yourself? Or would you simply have six extra hours each day of overcommitting yourself to other people?

Life gets busy sometimes. Sometimes my slow mornings become just a slow five minutes before it’s time to speed up. But I savor the slow all the same. Because of all the time in my day that goes to other people, I like starting my day with at least five minutes for myself. Because we will never get it all done, today or any day. And I have all day for the other stuff.