Deceleration

Transcript of this video:

I often talk about being unhurried but I thought I’d also talk about deceleration – the process by which one moves towards being unhurried.

Deceleration I find can happen over different timescales and different levels and different cycles of our lives.

So for example, this year I had a really busy May and half of June with work.

It was very stimulating and full-on. And when that period ended, I was exhausted for about a week. I didn’t do very much and didn’t really want to do very much.

And then a somewhat less comfortable phase came in where I kind of filled the lack of stimulus with internal and effectively internal chatter.

I don’t actually experience a voice, but I have an inner dialogue that tends to be quite anxious and worried.

And that lasted, you know, maybe three weeks before, I guess around the beginning of August, I realised, oh, I was starting to feel better.

I think because I’d slowed down enough that instead of that slightly relentless chatter, that was almost there to substitute for the excitement that I was missing…

I discovered a slower, more unhurried kind of creativity where I was having some interesting ideas of my own that seemed to be coming kind of at a lower pace and almost at a lower octave from my regular thinking.

I think that deceleration towards unhurried can sometimes happen over much shorter time scales, and it can happen in groups.

So for example, in my work, if I’m working with a group and we’ve had a chunk of time doing stimulating activities, generating ideas, having conversations and debates, which are often characterised by sparkiness and bouncing ideas and interruptions, and then I introduce an unhurried conversation.

It’s an attempt to deliberately slow things down, make the turn-taking more obvious. We use a talking object and that often results in silences.

And some people love those silences straight away. And for others of us, and I’m one of them, those silences can be pretty uncomfortable.

We talk about awkward silences, and I think for many people what’s actually happening in the silence is there isn’t really silence.

There’s silence in the outer world, the group.

And then there’s this massive inner dialogue full of… “well I’m leading this group. I should be saying something. Is this process working? Or should I say this? Should I have said that?”

Lots and lots of quite anxious thoughts that are very uncomfortable to be with. And we might wanna put a stop to this process because of it, but if we stick with it, we often find that chatter gets replaced by something and we can drop down into a more interesting and unhurried space.

And what’s lovely about doing it in a group is the group can kind of figure out that deceleration together, not with a plan but by a series of small incidents, which might often begin with someone just saying how much they hate the process.

And maybe someone else saying, well, I hate it too. And then there’s a pause and then someone says what they like about the process.

And you know, people often then start talking about the thoughts in their heads. And we go, “oh, so I’m not the only one with thoughts in my head.”

There’s all this stuff going on in our imaginations, which a lot of the time we’re not really sharing in the group, but which when we do share often creates a really deep kind of connectedness.

Photo by Mohammad Alizade on Unsplash