An Artificial Pace...

Today’s topic comes from a line in a Gin Blossoms’ song, “Follow You Down.”  The line is “How you ever gonna find your place, running at an artificial pace?”

I heard the song the other day and I realized that line, in particular, has always struck a chord with me.  It is poignant and deep.  A question that needs answering, for me, over and over again in this life.

The song is about being true to yourself.  And as I have written, I struggle with that.  Sometimes, it feels as though the whole of my life has been lived for or at others.  That internal mechanism that directs me to fall in line with what is real and important to me, gets blurred when pushed up against others.  Where do you end, and I begin?  That is a question I have asked for a very long time.

Although I have reframed the question and begun to ask it this way, more recently, where do I end and you begin?  Same basic question but the focus shifted.

I feel like my life has always been run at an artificial pace.  I am like a runner unable to find my stride, so I am constantly over doing it and exhausting myself before the race has ended.  If I would just settle down and in, I could make myself less exhausted and perhaps more satisfied.

Age has a way of slowing you down, but so far, it hasn’t changed that internal cadence that calls for this very artificial and unrealistic pace.  We are all to some degree living beyond human scale.  Over committed, over stimulated, over caffeinated, overly over pretty much everything.  Life is so busy that the things that matter most tend to get lost in the shuffle.

Sometimes, I just feel like I am existing.  Sorting and shifting deck chairs on the Titanic.  The level of futility I feel sometimes in my every day existence is large and in charge.  I don’t feel like this all the time, but I do feel like it a lot of the time.

Being true to myself so that I have a prayer of being honest and true with you has been the hardest task I have ever undertaken.  I feel so much of me disappears on the shores of you.  I lie wasted on your beaches.  But then I get up, dust myself off and I am off running that artificial pace again, expecting you to keep up when I can barely do that myself.

These days I am working to slow down.  Do less.  Be present more.  It isn’t easy for someone like me that wants to cover as much ground as possible, quickly.  But I am working on it.  I mean, I know I am moving at an artificial pace, one that I allow others to set for me, and then commence the running without a thought of whether that is the direction I want to go in. Sometimes, I feel so caught up in the doing, that I absolutely lose why I am even there to begin with...

If I am being really honest, there is this part of me, that is terribly afraid that if I slow down at all, I am going to die.  Or cease to exist, or cease to be me.  I have become the race so it seems.  And my identity is all tangled up with that.  What I want to do, what I need to do, what I am avoiding doing.  Life does not feel good and wonderful when I am pushing myself to do more, be more, all the time.  Life feels like a grind, that is set to a cadence that is unachievable.

I know there is another way to live, I just haven’t achieved it quite yet.  Still allowing the needs, desires and wishes of others to dictate my days and weeks.  I am working on it and have gotten better...but there is always more work to do. And slowing down to a more reaasonable, enjoyable pace seems to be what the work is asking of me currently.

Again, still...

Always.