Lowering Our Idle

I’ve learned through all this that lowering our idle doesn’t signal a diminishment of energy or capacity. Rather, lowering our idle reduces the excess energy burned just to be where we are.

Slow but steady healing—that’s how deep healing happens, at the speed of the soul.
—Parker J. Palmer

Before my experience of chronic pain, I thought I was fairly centered and that I moved in a fairly slow manner, taking in everything around me. But after the months leading up to my back surgery and the months of recovery, I learned that I could move even slower and that it would enable me to touch the Center of Things more completely.
During the most difficult part of this passage, I was forced to move extremely slow, to literally do one thing at a time. At one point, I wasn’t able to reach for a mug and lift the carafe of coffee at the same time without hurting.

A year later, without the pain, I discovered that I like reaching for the mug and lifting the carafe one at a time. And so, moving slow enough to avoid hurting has taught me to lower my idle. 

The notion of idling refers to how a car engine runs when parked before going anywhere. Some cars have a fast idle and some a slow idle, as do people. I’ve always had a high idle: ready to go, ready to do. I would always accelerate to get to where I wanted to be. For example, I would put away the dishes in the morning quickly in order to climb the stairs quickly to get to the field of inquiry in my study where I could slow down and listen.

We tend to move at a high idle in our minds, especially when meeting the world: seldom staying in the present, but racing to the future and the past, bouncing back and forth. So much that we miss the moment of living that we’re in. It sound so simple, but lowering my idle has let me remember that I am exactly where I am, that life is exactly where I am. Once moving slower, I am more calm. 

Doing two things at once is also running a high idle. And thinking ahead while doing what’s before me is also doing two things at once. This, too, is running a high idle. Keeping the two activities in sequence like a simple dance of detail is lowering the idle. It doesn’t mean we don’t look ahead. It means that, like a baseball player, we don’t swing the bat before we see the ball.

Of course, old habits are stubborn. When I first traveled, once my back had healed, I had a tight connection between planes. I could feel my idle speed up. I was anxious before landing that I wouldn’t make the next flight. My mind started racing about where the next gate was, and what alternative flights might I catch, if I missed this one. I was getting tight.

Then, I remembered about the slow idle. How might I practice this in real time? I didn’t want to speed up or get tight but I wanted to make my next connection. I wondered if I could slow the idle of my mind, even though the connection was tight. I began to calm again.

And it occurred to me to try to stay calm and slow in my center, while asking my legs to move faster once we landed. This let me accept that, whether I would make my connection or not, I would be fine. All would be fine. I did make the next flight. But more importantly, I was able to have my mind move slowly, while my body went faster and this new, if awkward practice, reduced my stress.

I’ve tried to practice engaging a lower idle going forward. It actually seems a bodily practice of acceptance. I’ve learned through all this that lowering our idle doesn’t signal a diminishment of energy or capacity. Rather, lowering our idle reduces the excess energy burned just to be where we are.

Slowness, it turns out, is not a sign of laziness or a lack of care. Slowness actually allows us to enter life more deeply and to give and receive more precisely. Ask any crafts person, whether a woodworker, a potter, a jeweler, a musician or a painter. Ask any healer, whether a doctor, a nurse, a midwife, a hospice worker, or a shaman. Ask any teacher, no matter the subject. Nothing reveals its majesty or life-force until we slow enough to meet it.

The virtues revealed when burdened or suffering can’t fully be embraced as teachers until the burden or suffering has been removed. The lift of soaring never fully appreciated until we’ve landed. The gifts of diving never fully received until we’ve surfaced. The water we threw away never missed until we’re thirsty. The lessons we need, the ones we race by, never fully understood, until we’re forced to slow down.

Questions to Walk With

In your journal, describe a time when you were forced to slow down. What caused this? What was frustrating about this and what was rewarding? What is your relationship with slowness now?

In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of a time when you rushed at a pace faster than you could understand what was before you. What did this gap cost you? How would you describe the price of moving too fast? How would you describe the pace of true living? 



This chapter is from my book in progress, The Brilliant Jagged Journey of Life.