slow and steady

Adrenaline fuels me through the weekday mornings when we are running late, but the child whom I am trying to get to school on time doesn’t care much if he gets there on time or not, and so he packs up his bag and puts on his shoes and coat with no sense of urgency. In those minutes, it seems to me that we are experiencing time very differently; he tells me that he is moving as fast as he can, but to me, it seems that he is moving awfully slowly.

In other situations, I am much like him. If a recipe says that a dish requires 20 minutes for preparation, I know that I will need 40 minutes to prepare it. Making sure that I have filled out a form correctly can be excruciating. And when I speak, the words come out either in a neurospicy jumble or deliberately, with long pauses. I prefer to write, but I write slowly.

I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter if I’m slow, so long as I’m steady. I’ll probably never get to the bottom of the to-do list, but I’ll make my way through it steadily. Writing these few hundred words will take me more than one evening, but they’ll get written as long as I return to them. Meanwhile, on my runs I’m slogging along in Zone 2 so that eventually I’ll be able to run faster without asking my heart to work so hard. Though my effort may be steady, my progress isn’t steady. I keep at it all the same.

Before Covid-19 closed the gym and everything else, I worked one half-hour each week with a personal trainer. I was a hot mess, often threatening to cry during sessions (I don’t know if I ever actually did), and my trainer was wonderful, so patient, encouraging me to have that same patience with myself. “Take your time,” he’d say to help me focus on an exercise, and even now I sometimes hear those words in my mind just as he said them, as though the angel on my shoulder whispered them to me.

The devil tells me I’m running out of time, to worry, to put it off until tomorrow, to give up. The devil is incoherent and loud, but he can go back to hell; I have things to do.