Pop 89: Sloowww Down
By Madonna Hamel
Sometimes, it takes a catastrophe to slow us down. My brother had a stroke. Medical professionals refer to a stroke as an “event.” My experience of “events” are positively anticipated occasions - weddings, concerts and, meteor showers, that sort of thing. We prepare for an event; it doesn’t throw us on our butts, leaving us winded by the shock and theft of it. These days, when people talk too fast or expect too much of my brother, he says: “Slooowwww down. I’ve. Had. A. Stroke.” Not an event.
He tries to take own advice because, when he doesn’t, he pays for it through all manner of unnerving physical responses. To those who wish they could slow down but feel at the mercy of their metabolism and the pace of the city, I say, move to the country. But I know it’s difficult for a single person who is neither a rancher nor farmer to find accommodation in the country. We can vaunt about the glories of rural life, but our world is not designed for single souls who crave rural solitude. My brother lives on an island where there is plenty of accommodation, but rather than rent to full-time single residents, owners do short-term rentals to vacationers. When the holidayers leave, the residences are empty, even though there are plenty of people who contribute year-round to the economy who need a home.
Myself, I am readjusting to a new landlord. That’s a telling word: landlord. Lord of the land. Does that make me a mere serf, a peasant at the mercy of the owner? As if we can ever “own” land. The concept of parcelling off a plot of land and calling it mine seems as bizarre as cordoning off a square footage of sky and saying- not yours to breathe. Come to think of it, we do that too, don’t we; nations own air space. We revere property owners, they have clout, have say. From Canada’s inception as a nation until 1920, voting was considered a privilege for a select few. Only men aged 21 or older who were British subjects by birth or naturalized citizens and owned property could vote.
But I’m not here to talk about property. I can think of few things more boring than listening to people talk about what they own. I am talking about getting away from the inflicted pace of the cities, where weather and the seasons are rarely factored into one’s daily consideration of chores, travel, and daily goals. But out here, nature rules. Hubris will get you snowed in, heat stroke, and caught in weather with no one and no cell reception for miles. You can die out here, but you can also start to really live. We used to sell a t-shirt at the little red school-house museum that read: There is No Wi-Fi in Grasslands National Park, But I Promise You’ll Find a Better Connection. I bought the last one. I knew we’d never be getting more of those in stock as the demand for Wi-Fi is too great in the world, even in remote places where people make an effort to remove themselves from the fray only to scramble for Google or texting.
My brother recently wondered if maybe the stroke’s main lesson was to slow down. D’ya think? I laughed. But it had not really occurred to him before. Just like it doesn’t occur to me that I talk a lot and interrupt even more and that I too, could benefit from slowing my brain down and just listen. I’ve been thinking a lot about our individual experiences of life- how we sustain habits that can harm us, but we don’t feel their detriment because we’ve been doing them all our lives. I’ve lived in this body for 65 years, and although I still think I’m 25, I’ve had 65 years of doing things a certain way. I wish sometimes I could ask a friend or sibling to spend a day in my body and report back. I suspect they’d say, “Whoah! How can you live like this?” I know I could not maintain the pace of some people, nor their degree of worry or constant multi-tasking. It would fry my circuits. But, like the frog placed in slowly boiling water, we fatally adapt. We get used to our detrimental habits. Until the body says no, or whoah, slow down, pal.
Grasslands National Park is the quietest place in North America - or was when acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton came here to measure sound levels in the early 2000s. And it’s a Dark Sky Preserve. That’s a gift; it’s hard to go madly off in all directions in the dark silence. Darkness and silence slow us down; we need to see where we are going. We are hushed by silence - as the desert monks used to say: The quiet quiets us.
And something else happens in the dark, the slow and the quiet: we engage with smaller things: The candle flame. The moths gathering around the porch light. The horizon line of hills or trees, their shadows slightly darker than the rest of the space around them. There is also the hoot of the owl. The breathing of a sleeping child. The tick of the clock. The call of the coyotes. The crunch of the gravel or the twig underfoot. The beating of one’s own heart. We become alert to the fine details of our surroundings, and the intimacies of life emerge. The happiness that comes from the slow, quiet and small awakes like a newly hatched bird safe in the nest of the heart.
This year’s the 50th anniversary of E. F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful.” “The idolatry of giantism,” he wrote, has created a “footloose” culture. Vast-reaching technologies have bred restlessness, alienation and escapism. Time to scale down, he warned. Scale down, slow down, settle down. I say: Forget “Hurry Up!” And “Go Big.” Just Go Home, where the heart is.