September is here! For so many of us here in this corner of the Northern Hemisphere, this time marks the end of summer and getting back to the hustle.
For me personally, the arrival of this September is extra poignant. This past year I had the privilege of pressing pause on life as I knew it, to embark on a yearlong “world schooling” adventure with my wife and two boys. Among all the learning and adventure, I found myself confronted in new ways with an important lesson. I’ll call it, Go Slow to Go Far. It’s a lesson that I think is relevant for this month, for the society in which I was raised, for our organizations, and for the planet. Let me share a couple of anecdotes from the trip that continue to marinate in my mind.
Lessons from Freediving
I experienced Freediving for the first time during a course I joined on impulse, while travelling along the Indian Ocean in Southern Thailand. It turned out this is about much more than seeing fish or learning to hold your breath underwater.
The course began in an outdoor pool attached to a coastal hotel, where we were aiming for a certain length of underwater swimming on one hold of the breath. On the final lap of each attempt, I would feel my chest begin to scream for air. Each time this happened, I kicked faster for my destination. And each time, I’d inevitably need to surface for lack of oxygen.
Finally, I went to the instructor for advice. “Try slowing down,” he told me.
I relaxed the mind and body, entering a kind of meditative state. And sure enough, I made and exceeded the course benchmark. I felt more grounded leaving the pool that day than I can remember feeling in a long time.
But this is the kind of lesson that apparently needs learning more than once. The next day in the open water, I struggled to equalize the pressure in my ears at greater than 5 meters of depth. After several attempts I swam back to the boat, feeling defeated, tired and disoriented. Finally, it dawned on me that I was again kicking too fast. I was rushing because I was afraid of running out of air. I slowed my breathing on the surface and dove again, this time taking it slow and stopping to equalize whenever the pressure began to build. I trusted my lung capacity and knew I had time to spare without rushing. And in that way, I made it to the bottom of the rope to pass the requirements of the course. Never had I understood so viscerally how slowness can fuel progress, or how relaxation can sharpen effectiveness.
Bosnian Coffee: A Ritual of Time
In the town of Mostar in Bosnia & Herzegovina, we entered a coffee shop run by a man my own age who’d taken over the business from his parents before him. I sat up at the bar as our host lovingly and carefully prepared our coffee from beans still warm from roasting. I listened while he spoke about growing up in wartime during the 1990s. He described how his father fought on the front lines, which was often just a street running down the middle of town where neighbours tragically battled neighbours. He and his mother had to forage for food at night to avoid sniper fire. A frequent treasure was the packages dropped by American planes. As a kid, he was most excited when they found a “#6” food package in the hills, which contained some kind of cookie. He now carries a bitter-sweet aftertaste of the memory, knowing the aid was often expired leftovers from the first Gulf War. He described how for generations before the Yugoslavian war, these same neighbours – Bosnian, Croat, Serb – had mingled harmoniously. They had intermarried at rates exceeding anywhere else in Europe, and all but forgot their supposed separateness. But when the war came, he said, no one really had a choice but to fulfill the demands of conflict and take a side – often simply by virtue of your family name. When his story was finished, he put the Bosnian coffee he’d crafted in front of us. It was art. “You have to understand,” he said as he did so, “coffee is a ritual of time.” It is precisely because it takes time – time that could otherwise be spend on something more “productive” – that for him gave meaning to the act of sipping Bosnian coffee. His personal stories were all that were needed to illustrate his point; we would have heard none of it if not for the act of pausing for that coffee.
From the Atlas Mountains in Morocco to the bustling streets of Cairo, we saw a similar ritual enacted with tea. There was something else in the pot, but its significance remained the same. This was a moment in the day for an intentional pause. Perhaps a moment to sit and laugh with friends or family. Because these cultures know that when we pause, we remind ourselves of our innate power to shape our time in ways of our choosing.
Obsessed with Productivity
Unfortunately, the lessons of Freediving and Bosnian Coffee are often lost us in Western society. The productivity paradigm, which says that the meaning and purpose of life is about getting somewhere else, is deeply cultural. Speaking as a white person, I’d also venture this paradigm is deeply White, in the sense of being wrapped up in a set of norms that prioritize constant output, individual achievement, speed, and control—often at the expense of relationships and collective well-being. Productivity, in its obsessive form, is a contagion that has metastasized in our society to the detriment of Indigenous peoples, people of color, and to all of us regardless of our racial and ethnic conditioning.
If obsessive productivity is cultural, then slowing and pausing is counter-cultural. Breaching these unspoken norms can even create a signal of danger within our brains and bodies. Personally, when I pause during a busy day, I can expect a part of brain to a minor freakout, alerting me that I’m wasting my time, going nowhere and will soon perhaps end up begging for food on the street. I may not be the only one.
Let’s consider, too, how the productivity paradigm plays out in organizations. The biggest resistance we hear, from teachers and school administrators about using more relational, collaborative and reparative problem-solving practices in schools – which we all know help enable kids and adults to thrive? “That all sounds good, but there’s not enough time.” What hinders the widespread implementation of restorative and healing approaches to justice in our criminal legal system, whether in policing, courts, probation or corrections? “It makes sense, but I can barely keep up with my existing caseload.” The list of examples could go on.
On a planetary scale, how much of the environmental degradation taking place on our planet is a result of our obsession with productivity and our inability to slow down? How much pollution, waste are greenhouse emissions are a product of our belief that we need to get there faster or grow out economy quicker?
Both ironic and deeply troubling is the fact that this paradigm has even taken hold within peacebuilding work. The monastic luminary Thomas Merton (citing his contemporary, Douglas Steere) accurately described this obsession with rushing as a kind of violence. In 1966, during the heart of the Civil Rights movement, Merton wrote:
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” (Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)
Whether it’s at home, at school, in our places of work, within peacebuilding movements, within the legal system, or on a planetary scale, the productivity paradigm too often works against us. Our relationships with ourselves, our friends and family, our colleagues and our biosphere suffer the brunt. Is it worth it? Is there another way?
Go Slow to Go Far
Let’s challenge ourselves to think like freedivers who are about to enjoy a cup of Bosnian coffee. In this changing season, when the to-do list looms large, let’s remember to move at the speed of relationships. When it seems like too much and we feel the constriction of breath, body and mind, let’s remind ourselves to keep taking moments to sip of the goodness of life, and then keep swimming in that steady, unhurried way, trusting there is still far more air left in our lungs.