I live in a fast world. I drive fast. I walk fast. I think fast. Many times I only slow down when working with clients and during my meditation practice. Then, when these moments are complete, it’s back to the speed.
This past January, I was lucky enough to spend the entire month camping and rock climbing in the mountains outside of Mexico City. Unbeknownst to my conscious awareness, at some point during those four weeks living in sync with the natural world, my speedy set point burned up.
An initial hint that I was somehow different came during the first leg of my return trip home. I walked into the International Airport in Mexico City and got hammered by the collective stress of three-hundred frantic travelers negotiating a maze of ticket scanning kiosks. Even with the burden of two fifty-pound bags and an overweight carry-on, I breezed through check-in and popped out the far side of security screening thinking, “that wasn’t so bad”. I sat down and ate a bag of potato chips for breakfast. It was 4:00am. Things felt weird. Maybe it was the chips.
When I landed in Denver ten hours later, I took inventory of the journey home. Where was my travel induced anxiety complete with mood swings and heightened confusion? Gone. I celebrated the personal victory but still did not know why I felt altered.
The answer came to me through sensation as I suddenly felt surrounded by the natural world, specifically, the soft, calm vibrancy from the high desert forest I had been immersed in during the last four weeks. The vibration or feeling was contained in a palpable bubble surrounding my physical body.
I also had an encompassing sense of feeling slow that emanated from the center of my bones. I was slow enough not to feel anxious, get lost, moody…it was as if the information that my senses were receiving was coming at me at a pace I could be present with and assimilate in a productive manner.
In the weeks that I’ve been back in Boulder, I’ve done my best to call up this bubble and its wonderful slowness during times of personal stress or when simply grocery shopping and driving, two activities I have historically accomplished in a frantic manner. For how long and to what degree I can maintain my relationship to slow has yet to play out. But no matter what happens to my internal pace, I now know slow lives deep in the forest and that it’s not hard to find.