The Creative Power of Slow

Today I drove from the San Francisco area to pretty near the Hoover Dam in NV. (Below is a pic from my current abode, looking out toward the reservoir the Dam creates.)

It was a very slow drive.

By that I don't mean I was driving slowly, though there were a few spots of stop and go traffic due to fools driving recklessly and getting into fender benders that slowed everyone down, resulting in older cars overheating and stalling, which further slowed everyone down. No, I drove with the traffic around me, which was mostly moving pretty quickly, as everyone headed out for the weekend.

But as I drove I became aware for the first time since retiring that I have total abundance when it comes to time. I could get to my airbnb here anytime I wanted to. No one was expecting me at any particular time.

I then realized that there is nothing in my future anyone is expecting me for. I mean, I do have responsibilities, but none of them come with a start time or due date.

The Scarcity Parallels

Have you ever realized how much you rush through life? Does it seem like there is always something you're trying to be ready for?

You don't want to be late for the appointment. You don't want to not finish the to do list for the day. You want to see if you can get ahead so you can take more time later. And on and on it goes.

I can speak for myself and say that I've lived most of my life with a sense of being rushed. As a child, by parents and teachers. As an adult, by me, and my ideas about what I should be doing with my time.

In and of itself, it's just manufactured stress, but there is so much more to it than that. You see, when you feel a scarcity of time, you program yourself for scarcity in general.

This tends to make you zig when you need to zag, to miss the cues, to let one opportunity after another pass you buy unnoticed. There just isn't enough space for anything unexpected in your life, and most people don't move through the day on the lookout for unexpected blessings.

Similarly, if you can train yourself to experience time in an abundant way, you will be attuning yourself to rendezvousing with opportunities to experience all kinds of abundance. Abundance of love, of money, of opportunities, of creative outlets, of all the things that make your life enjoyable.

Now you could pick any one of these things to open up and bring some spaciousness into, and it would bless you in the other realms too. But a lot of these things feel outside our control. But time?

Who is making your schedule? Once you left high school, didn't you become your own task master?

Though you may have built up a lot of obligations that create a tight schedule for you, you made it and you can remake it if you're sufficiently committed. So I'm suggesting right now that this would be a worthwhile commitment to make.

Slowing Down to Create More

All these different kinds of abundance give you the opportunity to create the life you want. When you have enough of everything.... not just enough, but an abundance of everything you value... you have all the inputs you need to enjoy the creation of whatever you want in life. Some things take longer to unfold than others, but when you're relating to time with a sense of spaciousness, what's the hurry? It's all so fun, why would you want to rush through it?

So as I was driving today, even though I knew I had as much as 11 hours of driving ahead of me, and though I'm still nursing an injured back, I let myself really relax into the present moment. I didn't have the radio on until the final hour of the drive. I just listened to the sound of the car, the road, the wind. I let my senses slow down, settling into Now.

Within "now" there is complete spaciousness. Time is both infinite and a single point at the same time. When we're rushing, we're really dwelling in the future. We're thinking about when something will be done, and trying to make sure it is "soon enough." We can only be present when we let go of our demands on time.

As we set time free, so too we set all of our creative power free. We have the ability to notice that opportunity for love, or money, or creative expression, or whatever it is we've been wanting more of in our life. We are able to let in what has been trying to come to us all along.

So I sit here now, in my 5th airbnb this Summer, relaxing into a new "now" in a new "here," thankfully this time with my dog at my side.

I've decided to never leave her with others for more than a few hours at a time again, so at my side she will be. I'm not going to go overseas for the Winter to start designing my eco-building project there as I'd planned, since it would have involved leaving her with others. I'm going to wait the remaining years of her life to move on to that phase of mine. No problem. What's the rush?