90 Miles an Hour Down a Dead End Street

"Speed doesn't give you more time -- it just botches what you've got and makes for inferior maps."

-- William Least Heat Moon. Roads to Quoz. p. 338.

The Beatles sang it "Slow down, baby now you're moving way too fast..." WLHM said it. Even the National Safety Council advises "Speed kills!" What other authorities do you need? Slow down already! You. Yeah, you. Now. Right now. Deep breath. Feel the stress drain from your body -- right out the soles of your feet into the earth, right out your fingertips into the world, right out the top of your head into the cosmos. Let the energy-of-hurry-up go.

God, time is a precious thing! And it's nothing. It's all we have. Or does it have us?

Really there are two kinds of time -- chronos and kairos. The first is clock time -- measured and demarcated, spent and hoarded, always fleeting, never enough. The second, kairos, is divine time, the doorway into eternity. It is always here, always now, and yet it transcends here and now. You never run out of kairos, you fall into it. And the deeper you go, the more you have.

Living in the world of kairos, rather than the world of chronos, there is never a hurry. What's there to hurry about? Where is there to hurry to? You're always in the Eternal Now. Living in kairos may not make for superior maps; instead it tunes you into a sort of intuitive GPS system so that even when you're lost externally, you're never really lost internally.

And it's hard to "botch" kairos. You can botch chronos from here to hell and back, but kairos is inherently unbotchable.

And here's the cool part -- the secret portal into kairos is a giant slide! By slowing down, you slide down into the Eternal Now, into the moment, into the Divine. And in so doing, you redeem both yourself and the world. It ALL comes alive! And you are there. Or, rather, here. You know what I mean.

S-l-o-w-l-y reclaim your life.