Take Your Time: The Wisdom of Slowing Down

by Eknath Easwaran

An unhurried mind opens a door to discoveries in every moment.

Yet for some reason it wasn’t enough. I was busy, but there was an emptiness in my heart that no success could fill.

“It’s not enough to be busy. The question is, what are you busy about?”

In fact, the Buddha says, our constant hurrying is often a kind of anesthesia. It’s not convenient to stop to ask big questions; it can even feel threatening. So long as we keep moving, we can put it off. “Wake up!” the Buddha says. “It is time to wake up. Why do you go on sleeping?”

but for Granny, a corpse was just a tattered jacket that its wearer had discarded.

Slowing down is not the goal; it is the means to an end. The goal is living in freedom – freedom from the pressures of hurry, from the distractions that fragment our time and creativity and love. Ultimately, it means living at the deepest level of our awareness.

When we have resentments or hostilities or ill will, he would say, not only our attention but our vital energy is caught in the past. When we learn to recall attention from the past and keep it completely in the present, we reclaim a tremendous reserve of vital energy that has been trapped in the past like a dinosaur.

Every time we do this, we restore a little more of our vital wealth to the present moment.

When we do things with only a part of the mind, we are just skimming the surface of life. Nothing sinks in; nothing has real impact. It leads to an empty feeling inside. Unfortunately, it is this very emptiness that drives us to pack in even more, seeking desperately to fill the void in our hearts. What we need to do is just the opposite: to slow down and live completely in the present. Then every moment will be full.

Similarly, when the day is done, leave your work at the office. When we put a leash on our work and bring it home like a pet poodle yapping at our heels, we are neither here nor there, neither at work nor at home – which means we are not going to be at home anywhere.

Without the precious ability to keep your attention in the channel you choose, it is not possible to be deeply in love or consistently loyal in your relationships.

To enjoy anything, we cannot be attached to it. William Blake understood this beautifully: He who binds to himself a Joy, Doth the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the Joy as it flies Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

What we usually try to do is to capture any joy that comes our way before it can escape.

Often, rigid likes and dislikes are merely a matter of attention getting stuck.

We get caught in a groove of what we have been conditioned to like or dislike,

If we care about a relationship, instead of always trying to force the other person to come our way, we can look for opportunities to go his or her way, which is good for both.

When your mind is under control, your taste buds will ask politely for food that is good for you.

Sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell are the channels that connect the mind to the outside world, and the study of the interaction of senses and mind is most fascinating. Just as the body assimilates food, the mind assimilates what the senses take in.

To enjoy life in freedom, we have to train the senses to listen to us, for the simple reason that attention follows the senses.

To do this, it is not necessary to deprive ourselves of good food or good entertainment, but simply to enjoy what is beneficial and ignore indulgences we will regret afterwards.

One of the main difficulties in grasping this is that we don’t have anything lofty to compare with the humdrum pleasures of sensory experience.

We can reverse the tendency of our civilization to impersonalize everything by making an effort every day to see other people as people, not objects.

In most disagreements, it is really not ideological differences that divide people. It is often self-will, lack of respect, putting ourselves first instead of the other person.

When you keep going faster and faster, you can’t even be aware that your mind is racing or that you are being insensitive to the needs of others.

Don’t compete in any relationship. Look for ways to complete each other instead.

“You are an exalted creature, with a spark of the divine within you that nothing you do can extinguish; and you have been granted life in order to give, because it is in giving that we receive,”

because a mind without a brake is a source of danger to us and to those around us too.

Before I took to meditation, although I was leading a satisfactory and successful life, I didn’t have any idea of who I am. Of course, I thought I knew: I was a village boy from Kerala who had become professor of English on a campus in Central India and was sure he was enjoying life and perhaps even contributing to it a little. Only later did I realize that I had been asleep and dreaming – no more awake, as William James says, than a man who thinks his capacities are limited to what he can do with his little finger.

When life throws up an obstacle – say, a problem that is getting unpleasant – don’t swell it with your attention. Put your attention fully on your work, work hard without thinking about yourself, and repeat your mantram in your mind whenever you can to keep hold of the center of stillness you tapped in the morning’s meditation.

As long as it is blaring as usual, we cannot hear the “still, small voice” inside. Meditation is for the purpose of quieting the tumult of the mind, so that, after a long, long period, when this cacophony has been brought to an unregretted end, we hear the

healing silence that has been going on within us all the time.