Slower

“The North Americans’ sense of time is very special. They are short on patience. Everything must be quick, including food and sex, which the rest of the world treats ceremoniously. Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: 'snack' and 'quickie,' to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run … that, too, sometimes standing up. The most popular books are manuals: how to become a millionaire in ten easy lessons, how to lose fifteen pounds a week, how to recover from your divorce, and so on. People always go around looking for shortcuts and ways to escape anything they consider unpleasant: ugliness, old age, weight, illness, poverty, and failure in any of its aspects.”

- Isabel Allende, My Invented Country

"My friend Don Kuhl is one of the world’s leading experts on how change happens. A couple of weeks ago Don said something on the telephone that I hastily scribbled down: 'Change is not an event. It’s a tiny decision made over and over again. Change isn’t once. It’s daily.'"

- Roy Williams in a Monday Morning Memo

I'm spending some time in the Mid-South this week. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. It seems like time moves a little slower here. Maybe it's the heat. Maybe it's the lack of good 3G service. Maybe they just can't keep pace with the rest of us. Somethings's off, somethings's backwards.

Or maybe they remember something the rest of us have forgotten. That time moves quickly enough all on its own and we accomplish very little by our insistence on hurrying things. That patience is a virtue, and that waiting builds our character. That the things that take the longest- to do, to make, to become- are the most rewarding things in the end. That there is something to be gained, not lost, in slowing down. And that so much is really just out of our hands anyway.