“The slower you do things,” a very wise person once told me, “the more time you seem to have.”
This is excellent advice. I tend to rush through things — meals, museums, writing columns — on the mistaken belief that if I can just do everything faster, I’ll have more time for other things. It’s counterintuitive, of course, but it’s the reverse that’s true. Taking my time on things — going slowly through a meal or a novel, typing these words with care and deliberation — is how I end up, somehow, with a lot more time on my hands.
I’m not sure how. The math doesn’t quite work. But it’s true, and I have spent the past month proving it. For Lent this year, I decided not to give up something — I’m terrible at that, anyway — but instead to do something. For Lent, I decided to go slow. And it turns out that if I take my time on everything and forgo my usual frantic, last-minute anxiety, everything gets done on time with some extra hours tucked away. I am using those hours to robotically click through the bad news about my retirement portfolio, but with my go-gently attitude and some squirreled-away antianxiety meds, I am making it through Lent, and, I hope, beyond, with a relaxed and in-control perspective.
For instance, last week, I needed to solve a confusing and utterly annoying problem with a Fruit-of-the-Month Club subscription I purchased for my mother for Christmas. Here’s what you need to know: I wanted to order one kind of monthly gift box, was told that was no longer available, switched to another gift box, and then received a blizzard of weekly emails and texts about the subscription that wasn’t available. When I called to sort this out, I was told that it could only be solved by me, going online, clicking the order number, putting in my password — “Do I even have a password?” I asked. “If you don’t, you can set one up at the prompt,” was the reply — and then clicking “About Order” on the phantom ghost order, which never existed, but which I needed to cancel.
Infuriating, right? And yet: I took it all very slowly, spoke to the person in a gentle, measured and unhurried way, refused to allow my rising anger to get me all agitated and urgent, and followed the instructions and solved the problem. It took about 15 minutes. With yelling, it would have taken much longer.
Another example: I needed to change the billing information for my home internet service, which everyone knows is a process that takes six working days, three enraging phone calls, and one daylong “chat” experience with a completely powerless live “customer service agent,” who is either a human being or a bot but, in any case, is unable to do anything. Deep breath. Take it slow. I find that I need to return the old modem to the store and get a new one. Pre-Lent, that discovery would have resulted in a ranting and venting monologue in six acts. With my new go-gently lifestyle, I’m in the car happily listening to the latest gruesome financial news.
“I’m very proud of you,” a friend told me when I relayed these two Lenten victories. “You seem to be controlling your worst impulses.” That sounded like an insult, but slowly, gently, I decided to hear it as a celebration. “Thanks,” I said.
“One thing, though,” my friend added. “The feelings and thoughts we don’t express, the emotions like anger and frustration, things like that, well, they just go down into the basement of our minds. And they lift weights.”
“Lift weights?” I asked.
“They get stronger. They put on muscle. They go down there and lift and sweat and get ready to reappear with a lot more strength. A lot more. So, um, I’d be aware of that.” my friend scoffed.
“I think I’m fine,” I said. “If this Lent has taught me anything, it’s that the gentle, slow approach to life is a lot more happy and productive.”
MY CAREER AVOIDING GIVING CAREER ADVICE
“Maybe,” my friend said, “but I know one thing. I don’t want to be anywhere near you on the Monday after Easter.” I was going to start yelling, but decided, gently, slowly, and didn’t.
For now, anyway.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.