Sometimes the world spins just a little too fast.
And we’re all here playing catchup. Well, that’s what I thought anyway: the faster I go through life, the easier it is to make up for lost time and experience everything – enrichment through efficiency.
Except it’s not all about efficiency, and I’m slowly learning the folly of rushing through things. It’s not necessarily a cliched argument that I “can’t spend the time to appreciate the finer things in life”, but it’s simply that a lot of things just can’t be rushed. In an ideal world, going twice as fast means finishing in half the time, but in the real world going twice as fast means spending twice the time fixing whatever you screwed up the first time around.
I’ve found this to be especially true when dealing with people. Lots of people comment I talk too fast…annoying if you’re just trying to hold casual conversation, incomprehensible if you’re trying to make sense of a presentation. The combination of a fear of boring the audience, of missing key points (of course writing them down takes too long and is, well, inefficient), a tendency to cram in too much material; I’ve ruined more than my fair share of talks from these traits.
Consider the ability to quick to “read” and understand a situation: good when action is needed, bad when it leads to judgmental decisions and bias from an early and unfair opinion. In the arena of savory pleasures, eating too quickly can be detrimental to your health (apparently our bodies haven’t evolved to digest food as fast as our hands have evolved to shove food down our throats).
Interestingly, this point was hammered home when I had opportune occasions to meet people able to do these things faster than I (that is: fast talker, very quick read, and speed eater) and growing a little scared of the ramifications. I’m (slowly) coming to the conclusion that I really need to slow things down, and years of speeding makes it one hell of a chore to tackle.
Good thing I’ve got all the time in the world.