Slow and steady. I hearken back to some thoughts I shared a few months ago in Blind Spots. I discounted my propensity to brake at the last second while driving, until a phone app made it a measurable and irrefutable truth. It was the only parameter in the app where I failed to achieve a perfect score. Until recently.
I was still stellar in my control of speed, phone use, and cornering. Alas, there was one other category (do you remember?) where I had begun to struggle mightily. Acceleration. I never believed that a silly phone app used to save me money on my car insurance could translate into multiple life lessons, but that appears to be the case, and I truly am grateful for it.
I sit at a red light. The clutch is pushed in completely with my left foot. My right foot is positioned delicately on the gas pedal and my right palm rests atop the gearshift knob. The light turns green and there’s this insatiable desire to accelerate. It’s not to some unsafe (or even illegal) speed. I just enjoy that adrenaline rush of feeling pushed back in one’s seat while moving ever closer to the posted speed limit. It’s like I was toying with the app on my phone. How fast could I accelerate without getting caught? Apparently, that research experiment failed miserably, because my acceleration score quickly tanked.
But, as always seems to be the case, my experience caused me to connect the dots between driving a car and daily living. In the car, I wasn’t accelerating because I had somewhere to go any quicker. My choice wasn’t borne out of some sense of urgency. It was just because. The same thing was happening in my daily life. I would undertake what I would call less than desirable tasks with rapid acceleration, moving from zero to sixty in record time. Perhaps I was doing so in order to arrive at the other end of my undesirable task expeditiously, but why? I stopped to think about it and realized that I wasn’t even rushing to get something done so I could do something more enjoyable. No, once I was done, I would just be sitting around thinking about the half-baked job I did. That doesn’t sound productive in every definition of the word.
So, the next time that opportunity presented itself, I forced myself to slow down and embrace the process. And yes, I can see where the utterance of those words sound contrived and clichéd. But still, I did. It was a different kind of research experiment for me. After all, I knew what it felt like after rushing through something and feeling as though I cheated. If you want different results, do something different. I know, more cliché, and it is something I continue to struggle with even after bringing it to my attention.
What happened on this occasion, though, surprised me. I thought that I would have to continually refocus and recommit to my internal promise. To slow down and focus on the process. Instead, I found myself at the completion of my task with more energy and a better mindset than I had ever experienced before that point in time. It made me realize that sometimes the smallest choice, one that you don’t even believe is possible, can make the biggest difference. Maybe that’s a grandiose and overly dramatic statement, but why not at least consider it? If this whole do something different to get new results is a real thing, who says that it can’t extend beyond mundane tasks and into the realm of bigger life decisions?
I’ll mull it over when I’m positioned at the next red light, with my feet on the clutch and gas pedals, even if I’m pretty sure I’ll violate the acceleration limits of my phone app once again. Slow and steady in more important places will have to suffice for now.
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