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I had this odd feeling today. I had been listening to my daily podcasts at 1.75x speed. My husband was trying to get my attention this morning as we bustled about the kitchen to make breakfast. When I took my earphones out of my ears, listening to him speak to me at normal speed suddenly sounded utterly bizarre to me. It sounded like he was talking through a mouthful of molasses.
Every word that he was saying was just reaching my ears so. very. slowly.
It was then that I realized that my podcast listening had been training my brain to intake information at almost double speed. I thought that I had to do this. There was so little time in my day. I had to speed things up. When I watch my TikToks, I always, always press the side on videos to speed my viewing up to double time. This need for speed had become so addictive to me that I can feel my irritation rise when I see video applications that don’t have the ability to watch them at double speed.
But, as I have started speeding all of these things in my life up, I have realized that I’m not gaining more information. I’m just speeding up my own life so that I’m never stopping to savor things. It’s a cliche to tell yourself to take the time to stop and smell the roses. But it is a cliche for a reason: scientists insist that savoring is one of the keys to happiness.
I do know that if I inhale my food, my brain doesn’t have the time to register that the food was delicious, and my physical body doesn’t feel satisfied. I also read that if we think about how our time on this Earth is actually finite, we make more of an effort to enjoy that time that we do have left. Someone said to think about it like this: you really only have about 80 summers to experience in your life, if you’re lucky.
So, given that perspective, why would I constantly be trying to rush through my existence? What I really need to be doing is pausing, taking deep breaths, and truly savoring the moment. And I don’t have to be doing ten things all at once to feel productive. In fact, I have taken to removing my headphones in the last ten minutes of my daily walk so that I can just revel in the feeling of my body and the sound of the world around me, savoring life.
Like right now. I’m working on this blog post. I’m pretty tired because I had a day full of health appointments and a full day of freelance editing work. I really wanted, after all of that was done, to just speed through this post. But I’m taking small breaks as I write this to sit and think about what it actually means to savor writing. I have had this thought about slowing down my life, and I percolated those thoughts in my brain all day. I organized those thoughts and reviewed my day and summer experiences through that idea, and I’m writing those realizations down on this page. And now, after I sit with this piece and review it, I will put it on my blog and publish it for someone else to read and maybe they will pause to savor their life a little bit more, all because of this small thought I had after my morning breakfast experience.
Stopping and savoring is a really powerful thing if you think about it. I need to do it more often and slow my life down to a more manageable speed.
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