Slowing Down

Tree fluff on a spiders web.

Many people have found significantly more time through forced restrictions of normal activities. For many this has been a difficult experience. Sickness, isolation and enforced poverty comes with huge social and personal cost. Others have been presented with the opportunity to slow down and take a more considered look at their immediate surroundings. Slowing down enables deeper reflection and undoubtedly many will be planning long term personal life changes. As we slow and do less we can experience a curious effect: the apparent lengthening of time itself. In a busy life the thought ‘where did that day go’ arises frequently. The converse feeling is the sense that we have been in a space for a very long time or for an unknown period.  People who focus on achieving changes to their state of conscious often discuss this and Blake’s poem is the best known articulation. 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand 

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour

Forced as we are to stay where we are, the possibility of sitting, dispensing with the rush and chatter of tasks and goals now becomes very real. The tools we need are within reach and so much can be achieved through just relaxing and focusing on the gentle rhythmic movement of our breath. If we can get to a space in nature where we can sit beneath a tree and feel the breeze, so much the better. Just a short period of this every day will bring immense personal benefit. The sense of rushing necessity will recede. In its place we will achieve a sense that we have come closer to a gentler natural rhythm. 

For the animals around us the time they inhabit is manifestly different. When a cat springs at its prey we cannot see the manifold tiny physical recalibrations it has made during the movement; but the cat has not rushed. For the cat the movement is little more than leisurely.  The dragonfly will complete its adult life within months. When we see it hunting across the pond it’s sharp movements as it kills gnats are long sections of its own timespan. 

One simple excercise you may want to complete is to capture the song of a thrush or robin and slow it right down to listen. You can do this with very little technology using a smartphone and free software. The slowed songs reveal phrases and modulations inaudible to our usual time-framed perception and opens a new world of expression and melody.