the pace you keep

Aug 6

Dear Reader,

A lot of the people I sit with describe their life as unusually busy at the moment. Not busy in general, but busy right now, as though I've caught them during an unrepresentative stretch. Sometimes I'll hear the same description from the same person two years later, and both times it's offered as a temporary condition.

That's what makes pace hard to see clearly. We tend to treat it as a phase we're passing through rather than a pattern we're living inside.

You can feel the gap on the first days of a vacation, or at least I can. I've arrived somewhere with nothing required of me and found myself unpacking a bag that could have stayed packed, checking email one more time, restless by late morning. It takes me a couple of days to actually settle, and by then the trip is half over. The calendar says the week is off, but something in me hasn't gotten the message and keeps running at the old speed. Whatever that is, it isn't coming from my schedule, because my schedule is empty.

Our pace is one of the most visible things about us. The people around us could describe it in a sentence without much effort. But it's also one of the first places we can feel something else moving underneath, because nobody arrives at their speed by accident. Somewhere along the way it got set, and it's been running quietly ever since without checking in with us.

So the question isn't whether things are busy right now. They probably are. It's whether right now has been going on long enough that it's just called your life.

Yours in the journey,