Slow Down
So many folks make a habit of overextending themselves to prioritize something less than familiar. As we reach outward, grasping for something new, we rob ourselves of opportunities to dig deeper into what we know and how well we know it.
In a world so vast, it’s easy to constantly throw yourself toward new dirt, toward new pockets of wildness that you can check off your list. Even easier is submitting to our tendency to try and capitalize on a place, to try and wring every bit of experience from an excursion into the world.
I have found myself in this canyon more times than I can count and each time, though I have grown to know it well, it offers a new way into the maze that it is a part of. Like any great love, what was once an overwhelming chasm is slowly getting deeper and more intimate as I find myself drawn to the nuance of its curves and the sheer magnitude of the forces that carved them from the world. Every time I drag my calloused hands across these ancient walls, I find something new to pull me inward. It’s the little things, the tiniest specks of sweetness that turn lust into love and remind us of what matters.
There’s nothing quite like the slot canyons out here. The way the wind dances through time as it looks for a way back out into the sky. The softness of the stone as you find yourself moving deeper into the earth. The quiet compulsion to flee as you look up to see a log jam 25 feet above your head, a startling sight that forces you to realize what a flash flood down here looks like. I don’t know much but I know that there’s a gentle magic down here, a stillness that only greets you when you find yourself falling through the cracks in the world. If you should be so lucky as to find yourself alone in a place like this, give it a howl for me and let me know what it says when it howls back.
We’re taught that our bodies are made up of 206 bones, 78 organs, and more than 650 muscles. We’re born into the world blank, just a tiny bag of bones with a lifetime in front of us. Regardless of who we’re born, we become who we are as we move through the world. We might be built out of sinew and stardust but we’re held together by the moments that make us. These meat sacks we’re driving don’t come with instructions, just a belly full of guts that help us navigate the wildness of it all. I don’t know who needs to hear this but it’s ok to take a wrong turn once in a while. You don’t know which moments might be hiding on the side of a road you weren’t supposed to be on, which versions of yourself you wouldn’t meet had you stayed safely on course. Life isn’t lived in a straight line, give yourself permission to meander.
Somewhere down the line, a couple of the folks that know me and quite a few that don’t began asking me for travel advice. The conversation never seems to go as they think it will as I almost always disagree with their proposed itinerary.
Slow down. Let yourself sink into the places through which you move. Never forget that they are also moving through you.
Circle back. There is something powerful in the familiar. You owe it to yourself to revisit people, places, and things. Even if they remain unchanged, you have not.
Stay curious.
Dig deeper.
Pay attention.
Hold onto the little things that make life worth living, sometimes it’s the smallest moments that have the most gravity.
Our lives consist of so many moving parts, so many cogs spinning faster and faster as we get older. Most of the time, it seems most impossible to slow down.
Momentum takes hold and we throw ourselves into a never-ending feedback loop of “this is fine”.
We bend to the push and pull of life as it passes us by and we sit in wait without accepting that we might have a role to play in our own lives. The real work begins when we embrace the stillness of it all, the world around us. When we realize that we’re allowed to exist on our own terms and at our own pace, life stops happening to us and begins happening with you.
Slow down and be still, find out who you are when the world stops spinning.
