Thornton Wilder's Our Town has long been one of my favorite plays despite its tendency to be a tad overly sentimental - just a bit maudlin. Wilder employs a now-classic literary technique - to view one's life from the perspective of death. In a literary flight of imagination, the now-dead Emily is given opportunity to return to her life in Grovers Corners for one day. She chooses her 12th birthday. At 26 she perhaps cannot be expected to grasp the truth that so many of us so often "spend and waste time as though (we) had a million years."
Perhaps it is this realization of our finitude that prompts us to accelerate the pace of our lives. The danger is that we may miss life in the very haste with which we live it; that we fast forward our lives and miss their meaning.
One of the most painful parts of my ministry is watching people struggle with a frantic pace in a frenetic culture. "Is faster better?" I am the first to confess to being addicted to speed. I am about to add memory to my home computer - why? - to increase its speed - with which I am not satisfied. Will I ever be satisfied? Probably not. Because there is no end point to the ultimate speed with which we think we might like to live our lives.
Human addiction to speed is nothing new. Psalm 19 celebrates "a strong man (who) runs the course with joy." Isaiah points to those who "shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint ." Jeremiah admonishes us in these words: "if you have raced with men on foot, and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses?" Paul in his letter to the Corinthians asks: "Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may attain it." And, finally, hear again the Apostle Paul: "Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us."
Now, however, the pace of living has surpassed anything those biblical writers could have foreseen or even imagined. The whole ethos of our culture is built on increasing speed. The term 24/7 means the world is always open for business. Take a 1999 cartoon by Toles, "The Real Y2K Threat." A man sits at his computer with five thought bubbles over his head.
"The media says I should be rich by now but I'm not rich."
"I'm working twice as hard now and still I'm not really making it."
"I'm working and working to buy a lot of stuff that isn't making me feel any better anyway."
"The new millennium is coming but everything will still be the same."
"I feel myself about to shut down."
So do I from time to time. We are caught in the speed trap - only the fines we must pay are spiritual, not monetary. Speed kills. Speed can kill the spirit. We exhaust ourselves trying to accelerate the pace, and race to who knows what? Someone must know, because we are under constant pressure to do everything more quickly. It is the pursuit of much and quick, but not of why.
Psychologist James Hillman paints a frightening picture: "Look, a great deal of our lives are manic. I can watch 34 channels of TV; I can get on the fax and communicate with people anywhere; I can be everywhere at once; I can fly across the country; I've got call waiting so that I can make two calls at once. I live everywhere and nowhere. But I don't know who lives next door to me. Who's in the next flat? Who's in 14-B? I don't know who they are, but boy, I'm on the phone, car phone, toilet phone, plane phone; my mistress is in Chicago; the other woman I'm with is in D.C.; my ex-wife is in Phoenix; my mother in Hawaii; and I have four children living all over the country. I have faxes coming in day and night, I can plug into all the world's stock prices, commodity exchanges; I am everywhere, man - but I don't know who's in 14-B."[1]
And that was before the Internet. Our relationships suffer because we move so quickly we do not have time to develop them.
What has been called the "hurry sickness" has even infected our young. A cartoon of two little girls in conversation while waiting for the school bus is closer to truth than fiction. They stand there with calendar planners in their hands: One says to the other: "OK, I'll move ballet back an hour, reschedule gymnastics, and cancel piano ... you shift your violin lesson to Thursday and skip soccer practice ... that gives us from 3:15 to 3:45 on Wednesday the 16th to play."[2]
Our lives lose much of their spontaneity because we move so quickly on our overly-programmed paths.
One writer describes our pace in terms of the quality "intense." "The motor never stops. The engine always runs, the battery always hums. Within the psychic boiler room of the intense person there is always at least a skeleton crew, and that crew never takes a break. ... the whir of wheels endlessly turning. ... The intense are happy when coming down the home stretch. Do the intense ever rest? Never."[3]
And what do we do with the time we presumably save? Here is one breakdown on how we spend an average day:
"7 hours and 18 minutes sleeping - a 20% drop from a century ago.
6 hours working, if we're employed.
4 hours doing housework, if we're women; less than half of that if we're men.
3 hours watching TV - double the 1965 figure.
1 hour 26 minutes online, if we're online computer users
1 hour eating
52 minutes on the phone.
41 minutes reading magazines and newspapers
31 minutes caring for children
29 minutes visiting other people
16 minutes searching for lost objects
16 minutes reading books
7 minutes caring for pets and plants
4 minutes having sex - the same amount the government says we spend filling out government forms.
Don't bother to do the math, says science writer James Gleick. It will just prove what we all know: There aren't enough hours in a day."[4]
We're ensnared in the "captivity of activity," in a constant state of exhaustion - we'll never get caught up - never get everything done. We're exhausted physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. We believe, rightly or wrongly, that if we don't do it and do it quickly, it just won't be done or won't be done right - and it must be done.
One would think, after this horrendous catalogue of speed addiction, that we would be ready to join yet another 12-step group - speed anonymous - that we hate the lives we're living and want desperately to change - that we're just looking for some way out of the speed trap. Perhaps many of us are, but it is disturbing that many of us really like operating at the human equivalent of Mach 1.
I confess I am fond of complaining that there is too much to do and too little time to do it. Unitarian Universalists - with no monopoly on the practice - are fond of playing "one-upmanship," seemingly complaining about how busy we are, when we are really bursting with pride at all the important things that crowd our lives. I know, because I am one of them. You probably are too. It is the sin of pride raising its ugly head.
We love the rush we get when things go quickly. We are delighted when our computers process at mind-boggling speeds which we believed unthinkable just a year ago. Those who watch the Olympics are no doubt delighted when a human body runs the 100-yard dash or slices through the water at record-breaking speed. We are awed to learn that the fastest speed for cars was 39 miles per hour in 1898 and 763 miles per hour in 1997, with a car appropriately named Le Jamais Content (never happy).
Never happy. That is the human condition - we are never happy with the current speed of things. That drive to speed fuels globalization with its unfettered and obsessive competition to get things manufactured, delivered, processed more quickly. I am tempted to say that economics is to blame for our obsession with speed - and I am deeply concerned with what globalization does to people not only in economic terms, but in spiritual terms - as it speeds up our lives.
But it is we who are in charge of the economy - we are the managers and the employees, the customers and the stockholders in this globalized economy. There is nothing written into the structure of reality that says humanity has to engage in this often mind-numbing, frequently destructive competition that produces so much so quickly by making the rich richer and the poor poorer. While that is a vital issue, I am afraid it is our all-too-human nature that drives us to a pace beyond all reason and endurance.
You may have seen the 1983 movie by filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass - Koyaanisqatsi. It has neither dialogue nor voice-overs, just Reggio's images and Glass's musical score of minimalist music. "Hopi rock paintings are contrasted with nuclear blasts and rocket launches; the unharnessed forces of wind and water with the mechanistic densities of modern urban life.... Modernity is mostly shown unflatteringly through glimpses of rusted metal, ruined buildings and machinery spewing pollution; aerial film of highways, sped up so that the traffic melts into shimmering streams of red and white light."[5]
The contrast is between human pace and the rhythms of the natural world. We have properly adjusted ourselves to cope with the extremes of the seasons, but we have at the same time accelerated our pace, trying to transcend the rhythms and limitations of nature. Jet lag is only one of the surface symptoms of our attempts to outrace nature and time itself. The Concorde airplane is a pitiable and now tragic symbol of this destructive obsession with speed.
The 19th century poet William Wordsworth had it right, I think, when he wrote:
"The world is too much with us;
Late and soon, getting and spending,
We lay waste our powers.
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ...
We are out of tune; ..."
We are out of tune. We are out of synch. We are out of touch with the natural world. We are out of touch with ourselves. Unable to pause and smell the proverbial daisies, we find ourselves spiritually stretched to the breaking point. In a time when our capacity to live in security and comfort on this living earth is unmatched, and we should be spending more of our time and energy enjoying existence, we are flat out in a race to do - what?
The antidote to this seductive velocity? Let the soul catch up with the body. How? Let me illustrate with one part of my personal prescription. I can't run any more - arthritis - it is just too hard on my joints. And so, I have taken to walking - power walking with weights to be sure - but walking nonetheless.
And as novelist Edward Abbey writes, "There are some good things to say about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed.... Walking makes the world much bigger and therefore more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly.... To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me."
What's the hurry? Will someone please let me know what it is? I'd like to know. As the old preacher said, "God created time so everything wouldn't happen at once."[6] And wouldn't it be awful if everything did happen at once? But life is not, or at least should not be, a fireworks display with everything exploding simultaneously; it is an experience which we try to shape into a pattern, a narrative. It requires moments of intense exertion and quickened pace, to be sure. But it also requires a pause now and then - to assess where we are going, how quickly we wish to get there - and, more important, why. Slow can be beautiful.
There is an intriguing story told about Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood fame) which suggests what we might do if we do not believe that faster is better. At a recent Emmy Awards Ceremony he had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and went onstage to accept an Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award. There, in front of the soap opera stars and talk show hosts, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, 'All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are.... Ten seconds of silence." And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, 'I'll watch the time," and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn't kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked ... and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds ... and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, 'May God be with you' to all his children."[7]
Why the haste? To be sure, there is external pressure; however, the most powerful pressure emanates from us - from deep in the heart of us. We know that one day - too soon - we are going to die. We want to cram as much as possible into that brief drama that is our life. The danger is that in proceeding with such speed to some elusive destination, we will simply not enjoy the journey - or find any meaning in it.
Poet William Stafford deepens our understanding of time in these words:
"Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come -maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.It's a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you've been and how people
and weather treated you. It's a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, 'Here, take it, it's yours.'"
It is ours if we take it - like the story of an African safari whose guides, after several hours of exhausting travel, suddenly sat down. When the American hunter asked what they were doing, the leader of the natives said, "We come so far, so fast. We must stop and let our souls catch up." So must we.
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