Learning to Slow Down!

One morning last week as I was rushing to get the kids off to school, I took a nasty tumble down the entire flight of stairs to my basement. Thankfully my husband was still home and could help me and call 911. I shudder to think how long I would have laid in a crumpled pile on the landing if I'd fallen later when I was here alone. 

Ater being carefully placed on a backboard and carried to the hospital by our amazing, wonderful local EMT's, and being given 3 units of morphine, which didn't touch the pain in my back, but did ease the embarrassment of the whole situation, I was happy to be told nothing had been broken.

I've joked the past few days that nothing was broken but my pride, but that's not really true. Today it dawned on me ... something else was broken ... a very bad habit called rushing! And while I'm immensely thankful that I did not damage my body too severely (though I have lots of very pretty bruises) I am also thankful for the lesson of learning to slow down. 

I'm usually a fairly high energy person, so it's very natural for me to always be in a hurry, multi-tasking, juggling lots of things at once, trying to be in more than one place at a time ... you get the drift I'm sure. And I'm sure many of you who read my blog are exactly the same way, we all have so much to do, so little time to do it in, and we never like to let anyone down, least of all ourselves. So we push and we run, we drive ourselves and everyone else to the edge until we finally fall over the edge and realize how crazy we've let our lives get.  

Well, now that I'm at an age where I can truly look back and see the lessons I have learned and how I learned them, it has really come home to me this past week that I am missing out on the life I'm working so hard to create by rushing through it all. 

Many things have happened in the past few months, besides my fall, that I now realize have been God's way of guiding me to the path I ought to take and it is obviously a path to be taken moment by moment, gently and fully. I've been looking for the automated sidewalks in life that will whisk me along past all the other travelers to my next destination point and I've been missing the scenery, the tender moments, and who knows what else in my hurry. 

I'm convinced that we repeat mistakes and behaviors until we get it right, and suddenly I clearly see what I have been missing. I'm taking to heart a line from a book I'm reading called "The E-Myth Revisited" where a lady who started a business of baking pies because she was very good at it and loved it, but after turning her love into a business, or rather a "job", she found herself hating it and rushing through it all the time. When she tries to figure out how to turn things around, she is reminded of what her aunt who taught her to bake told her ... that "Baking pies isn't about getting done, it's about baking pies." 

I'm slowing down, smelling the roses, putting one foot gently in front of the other now, and I'm happy to see what turns up along this path that I might have missed if I'd kept up my former pace.

What a freeing experience it is to give yourself permission to slow down. Don't wait until life forces it on you through an accident. Of course I still have a lengthy to do list, and I will fret when I'm behind I'm sure, but I do believe I'll keep broken that bad habit of flying faster than my guardian angels. I hope you will too. Life is too short for making ourselves crazy with stress.