by Beth Black, Co-Founder, Cherokee Creek Boys School
I took a walk today… my usual coronavirus exercise. Partly cloudy, pleasant breeze… perfect. I stopped halfway to tie my shoe and decided to sit for a while and on a bench to enjoy the grey clouds racing across the sky. It reminded me of my childhood in West Hartford, hiding in the tall grass in the field behind my house… just watching the clouds and being in a world of my own imagination.
After a few minutes of musing I thought “time to go”. Then I stopped myself! No, you have all the time you want…nothing pressing, no place you need to be… coronavirus has put a pause button on all the “normal” events of my day and given me this gift of time. A great blue heron landed near me… a fish jumped in the lake near me… a moment of clarity.
Angeles Arrien tells us to live our life in “nature’s rhythm which is medium to slow.” I realized that my life was really more like “STOP AND GO” than “MEDIUM TO SLOW” … Go, go, go, then completely shut down. Gear up and do it again. Sound familiar to any of you?? It’s a pattern learned over years of working against deadlines, raising two children and, frankly, enjoying the activity. But the gift of this pandemic is a new pace and I need to remember it when the “real world” returns!
I created a little mantra for myself:
From
STOP and GO
to
MEDIUM to SLOW!
For years I have loved the StoryPeople books by writer and artist Brian Andreas. The illustration to the left is a “story” that sits on my desk as a daily reminder.
From now on, I will pay more attention to it and move more slowly.
How about you…what are your “medium to slow” stories?
