Learning to Slow Down
(With a Little Help From a Friend)

It is most amazing to me that when I make a vow to myself to carry out some new venture—at least on the intellectual level, some new needed growth I decide to pursue in my mind—that my body engages itself in my intent. In fact, it does so in such a way that I can’t neglect the vow I’ve made to “do better, be better and to follow through on my decision.”

For instance, I am in the middle of writing a book on listening. All the lessons I’ve learned after leading some 250 Listening Groups have been swirling in my mind. Through the years, I’ve written a chapter here, a few paragraphs there; here a short article, there some notes on new discoveries I’ve made on the impact of being heard and understood.

I have a whole bookshelf of resources on the topic of listening written by other authors and experts. I even coerced a brain surgeon, an expert on the science of neurology, to co-write the book with me. (He also happens to be a good friend and couldn’t, I suspect, find the resolve to say no.)

So, I decided the first chapter would be given the draft title of “The Healing Power of Being Heard and Understood.” And I finished writing that about three months ago. The second chapter, at the suggestion of my co-author, Dr. Roger Vieth, was to be about slowing. His rationale was that we couldn’t really learn to listen, we couldn’t really be good listeners, we couldn’t hear deeply and understand with empathy what someone was telling us about themselves, unless we stopped racing through our days frantically, breathlessly, and with a to-do list that had as much undone at evening’s end as it did at day’s beginning.

This made perfect sense—right? It makes perfect sense to you as you read it, doesn’t it? It was at this point that my body decided it would step in and MAKE SURE I was writing out of real-life. None of this writing about something intellectually. My body made sure I wrote out of experience.

It began casually—this takeover of my human trajectory by my own body. It began with a simple annual physical checkup. It ended with the advice and care of five medical specialists, a pile of prescribed-medicine bottles, morning doses and evening doses. Something was wrong with my heart—maybe. I did have high blood pressure (stubborn indicator of things going wrong). For one week, I wore a Holter monitor to measure the rapidity, consistency and regularity of my heartbeat. This all ended after my cardiologist finally declared, “There is absolutely nothing wrong with your heart. We can’t find any markers in your bloodwork.”

However, my gastroenterologist was not done. A colonoscopy was scheduled. And, by the way, might as well do an endoscopy at the same time (my esophagus does have some dysmotility—but believe me, I can live with that).

The week that I was scheduled for the above surgical drama, I finally said to my body, “OK. OK, I get it. You are trying to tell me to S-L-O-W down. And if I won’t listen, you’re going to make certain that I do.”

And then I responded with the words I’ve learned to use when my body finally gets my attention. I said, “Thank you, dear body. You are one of my best friends. I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention to you sooner.” I went ahead and canceled out of everything I could cancel. I stopped making all the lists I usually make in my head—I pressed the list-making button in my brain to OFF. AND—I, who usually sleep four to five hours per night if I’m lucky—began to sleep eight, nine, even ten hours. It was as though I was making up for all the lost shuteye I’d tallied up since my first child, as an infant, woke me from the last really sound sleep of most of my adult life.

Theologians engage in deep conversations about the difference between kairos time and chronos time. I’ll spare you the Greek definitions of these phrases. To simplify their meaning for myself, to live in a kind of practical understanding of the terms, I’ve defined kairos as the time that is unending, stretching out foreverward, without hurry or haste, in the quantity and quality of being where God the Almighty resides.

Its opposite, of course, is chronos. This time is the limited, defined, ever-ticking, always-running-out, precipitous advance toward the next click and the next where the sand in the hourglass is always flowing. Once chronos time is gone, we cannot get it back. Kairos is God’s dimension; chronos is man’s.

So, during these days (weeks, months, half-year or so) of slowing, I have been attempting to live as much as possible in kairos time. The goal of this is not so that I will accomplish more in each day but actually less. I want to be present to the dimension where God is present. One of the ways I know I’ve been living in kairos moments is when I look up and think, Oh, my goodness. It must be 3 p.m. Then I discover it’s still only 10:30 in the morning.

So, during this season of slowing in my life, I want to experience more and more the reality of God’s time. I do not want to be driven by the lists I write out. I want to slow down, then slow down some more. I want to get more and more glimpses of “the other side.” I want to intentionally peek more and more around the corner at eternity. I sense for these moments the vastness of the unending universe. “One day with the Lord is as a thousand years…”

So. Think about slowing down. Listen to your body. What is it trying to tell you?—It is a great friend if you will let it be. Breathe. Breathe again. Listen to the silence. Let laughter bubble up. Remember joy. Take your time.

Karen Mains

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Karen Mains

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