“When feeling urgent, you must slow down.” – Mark Nepo

About 25 years ago, I had to travel to France for a business trip. The conference that I was presenting at was in Nice. I tacked on a few extra days to spend time in Paris before I met my colleagues in the south of France.

I enjoyed Paris immensely. When it came time to fly to Nice, I arrived at the airport on the afternoon of my scheduled flight to discover that there was a transportation strike and no flights were leaving.

My high-school French language skills weren’t all that good when I was actively taking classes and 15 years later, they sucked. So I was stuck in an airport ticket line trying to speak or understand enough French to find a solution. Needless to say, I wasn’t getting anywhere.

There was a young American woman behind me who was also scheduled to fly to Nice. Stymied by the French “je ne sais pas” answer to all our questions about when we could fly, we decided to rent a car and drive there.

Time has erased my memories of how we actually got the car. But that was the night that I learned that France is a bigger country than I thought. We drove all night long and arrived at 5am the next morning. I was completely wiped out. Two days later I gave my presentation and immediately threw up afterwards. It wasn’t anything serious – I just was completely spent.

I’d like to say that I learned a lesson about brute forcing solutions to my problems that night. I didn’t. But it was the first clue in a long list of situations from which I started to learn about the roadblocks in life. Sometimes when we’re aiming to get somewhere, trying harder isn’t the only way to do it.

I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom from poet Mark Nepo in The Book of Awakening:

“When feeling urgent, you must slow down.

I learned this, over and over, during the many crises of cancer. Unless someone is bleeding or can’t breathe, unless there is some true physical requirement to act swiftly, a sense of urgency is a terrible illusion, a trick that happens, again and again, because life inside our skin and outside our skin are forever different.”

The month of March often leaves me feeling urgent. It feels like a long stutter step on the transition to better days – or at least longer ones. This post is my reminder to slow down and just let it come.

(featured photo from Pexels)

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