Sunday, October 12, 2008 De la Cruz-Busto: Slow down By Li-an de la Cruz-Busto Choices
MANILA -- I suddenly found myself pondering after reading an article on the hurried women syndrome recently. I was totally struck that I had to read it all over again.
I was like what one would call-kiti kiti (wriggler). I like to do scores of tasks and accomplish these all at once. Like-I want to sell stuff to be able to buy things that I like. I want to get a good job so I could afford myself with things that we all dream for in life. I want all my aspirations in life to come true. And I thought the key to all these was speed.
It is like... if you move fast, you get to do so many things. If you are fast, you get to the finish line well ahead of others. There is just so much that I want to do in life that I thought would have been answered with speed. I thought that if I used speed to direct my life, everything follows.
My being such a hurried person was further intensified when I trained for the profession that I have gone into. We were trained to do things really, really fast. We were trained to do things no more than five seconds as much as possible.
At that time, I was figuratively always on the fast lane that spending time with family and friends was a rare occurrence. I could not just meet up with friends anytime I want to even while I was back home in Davao because I was not in control of our schedule.
I could not do a lot of things that I would have wanted to do because of time. My passion for writing had to take the backseat because I needed to think (which means also slowing down) to compose something. Unless I was doing news articles, where the most fundamental concern was to deal with the who, what, where, when and how, speed was indeed an element.
If I was not going to write news stories, I had to psyche myself. I would need time to read, relax and while my time thinking for a subject although there are actually countless of topics to write about.
I was always the type who would squeeze activities in such a short time. My husband would always tell me to relax because I would always complain of headache with my self-imposed and timed actions.
A good friend, who works for a banc assurance firm, complains of the same thing. She, however, suffers upset stomach every time she gets stressed. Recently, she told me that she feels more "butterflies" in her stomach following the economic crisis brought by the crash of the US stock market. Her agents, she said, have added to her worries because of fears of the seeming global economic trend.
Back then, racing time was not associated with stress in the same perspective as it is these days.
Women, particularly those who were mothers, are used to multitask because they had their hands full as parents, wives, home keepers, teachers, to name a few. Back then, too, they were hailed as superwomen or uberwomen because of their capacity to do so many things as well as assume different roles.
Fast-forward today, an author wrote that women who multitask now complain of chronic stress, tiredness, weight gain, sleep problems, guilt, to name a few. These, she added, are symptoms of women suffering from hurried syndrome.
The author wrote that people have become slaves to time, thus, are unable to enjoy life's simple pleasures. Most of us find ourselves in such entrapment of life especially these times when we consider time very precious. For most of us every second counts really.
The answer to this problem is plain and simple-slow down. Speed, she said, kills joy. By slowing down, we get to do things that we have not done for some time because we could not hold time still to slow down and do things without rushing.
Just when I thought I had read enough of the article, I did some pondering on the "what shoulds" and "what ifs" in my life, more things I want to do. This time, I told myself, I should adopt the growing trend in Europe that is slowly gaining ground -- the no rush attitude or the slow down culture.
And yes, in a forwarded email on the same topic, it is rightly so to "plan and prepare for tomorrow, we all ought to give ourselves time to slow down and enjoy, we owe it to ourselves and our loved ones."
Maybe reading the article was a blessing in disguise. I have long wanted to return to my passion but just did not find the right time to do so because I find myself always preoccupied with a lot of things.
This time, however, I would like to bind myself with time, which we have plenty of.
*****
Li-an, a mother of one, is a pilot-officer married to a pilot-officer. She was a reporter of Sun.Star Davao just before she decided to fly.
