It is way too early in the morning.

I’m going to drink a lot of coffee, read some news I don’t need to know on the internet, and write my morning blog post.

I’m going to drink a lot of coffee and write a post about how we can’t slow down.

Oh…the hypocrisy of it all.

Or…even better….I’m going to drink a lot of coffee, write a blog post about how as a culture we can’t slow down…and listen to the George Winston channel on Pandora.com.

We live in confusing times.

I was listening to conservative talk radio while I was driving around for the USPS the other day, and the guy was talking about Beyonce’s performance at the halftime show of the latest Super Bowl.

Of course, he didn’t like it…too loud, too much flesh, too suggestive, etc.

I thought it was a pretty good performance….but my perspective may be off somehow.

Anyway…

He raised the observation that the performers at the original Super Bowl were a marching band.

That was a different time, for sure.

I doubt that we’d be able to sit through a marching band performance for a big game half-time show now.

Now we measure our dissatisfaction in numbers most of us don’t even understand. When we buy a computer, we know that the faster it is…the better it is….even though what we have may be perfectly fine for most human needs.

Human needs?  Basic human needs must include the ability to put our hands on a keyboard now.

Through the internet, I can know more about things I didn’t need to know anything about faster than ever before…and always feel like there may be something that I’m missing out on…”just give me a second…I know I can find it out there somewhere“.

They used to call the “slow food movement” a… dinner party.  Nobody had to be told to slow down and enjoy the experience.  There wasn’t any need to divert from the “hectic pace”…because we hadn’t learned to live like that yet.

People have always talked about the “rat race”…I remember wondering what that was when I was little…but I wonder if things haven’t accelerated some since I was younger.

I almost wrote “since I was young”….holy smokes.

There were things that were taken for granted as being the way it was always going to be.

We said the pledge at school, we held doors for each other, we didn’t feel bashful about wishing each other a Merry Christmas….we didn’t worry about where it was sanctioned that it was acceptable to pray.

Praying wasn’t a confrontational thing…it was just a conversation.

I’ve heard it said that time feels like it accelerates as we get older.

I can’t really tell if we cram more into a year and it feels like it goes by faster because of it…or that things have started spinning faster as I’ve “gotten up in years”.  It’s a gradual thing…if it happened all at once we could tell what was happening and maybe put on the brakes.

I told a friend once when we were talking about being married that it wasn’t really about doing everything right every time…that was kind of impossible to figure out how to do that…it was about being willing to try.

Maybe being willing is the best we can do as far as slowing down goes.

Another friend, a songwriter, has a lyric where he says “try to explain how a man holds a vigil, alone on a crowded street”.

I guess that all of us hold our own version of a vigil…whether we know it or not.

I think that acceleration is a given…things are going to move as fast as we allow them to…and probably faster than we understand.

Man…it took a lot longer to write this post than I expected. Now I’m behind on my “speed surfing”.

Just kidding…but kidding quickly.