Pick Slow

The end of the school year rolls in like a freight train making an abrupt stop.  The high pitched screech of metal on metal, passengers thrust forward from the sudden shift.

I catch my breath and the silence is shocking.  The train is at a dead stop now, the blurred lines of the moving plains now a still field.

All that work to desperately reach my destination, but now we're here and the silence is deafening.  I look around wondering how to get moving again, what to put in place to fill the silence.

But I hear the invitation.

Sit.  slow.  quiet.

I don't want quiet.  I want significance, meaning, activity.   Fulfillment.  A facebook worthy life.

Get off the damn facebook and live your own life, not someone else's.  And live slow.

Live slow.  Live slow.
But slow sounds lonely.  And lonely is my worst nightmare.

Live slow.  Say no to tennis lessons next week.  It doesn't matter that boy-in-class or kid-on-facebook is signed up for 15 camps and private lessons and things to make him wonder child.  You, pick slow. You pick slow enough to get to the afternoon and to be able to say "does anyone want to go to the library?"  And when everyone says yes, you pick slow and meander to the library.  You live slow enough that after strawberry picking you can make your favorite homemade waffles and slather them with strawberries and eat them in the middle of the afternoon with no worries if the dinner schedule gets pushed back.  You live slow enough that when you hear of the mom in need you can go pick up her laundry and help a friend.  You live laying in the sunshine on a towel in the middle of your yard, cuddling up with your boys at bedtime, and reading through a novel together.  Live slow.  It's what you yearned for and desired the whole speeding train ride here, and now that it's arrived, don't throw it away in hopes of some illusion of what fast brings.  You, pick slow.