"always more in the world..."

There are times when it is really worthwhile to read something slowly. Savor it. Really think about what it is saying. I came across this passage the other day, and I had to read it a few times just because I wanted to chew on it a while.

No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour, nor making of stuffs a thousand yards a minute, will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. And they will at last, and soon too, find out that their grand inventions for conquering (as they think) space and time, do, in reality, conquer nothing; for space and time are, in their own essence, unconquerable, and besides did not want any sort of conquering; they wanted using. A fool always wants to shorten space and time: a wise man wants to lengthen both. . . . We shall be obliged at last to confess, what we should long ago have known, that the really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being. -- John Ruskin, from Modern Painters (1843)

Isn't that profound and quite beautiful? (Go ahead, read it again if you like. It's really worth it.)

And isn't it apt? We here, closing in on the first decade of the twenty-first century, have created an incredible pace for ourselves. We bust our own chops to finish our work, only to take on more work. We race our children around from one practice to another, from this activity to that. We schedule ourselves from morning through noon and far into the night.

We rarely, so rarely, take the time just to be. Constantly going, almost never being, we come to the end of a day too exhausted to take stock of what we have accomplished. We frantically note down our children's milestones in memory books or photographs -- in part because we want them to know what their own first words were and in part, secretly, I think, because we are afraid that what with all the other things we have to keep at the forefront of our minds all the time, we might forget to tell them those stories otherwise.

When I was a child, I remember that one of my favorite things to do was to sit and listen to my grandmother tell stories of what my mother was like as a child. Quiet and inventive, the little girl took her father's screwdriver, hid under the kitchen table, and methodically removed every screw from the joints holding on every leg. She piled the screws neatly at the base of each corresponding leg. It wasn't until my grandmother noticed the table swaying gently that she thought to investigate what was going on underneath. That little girl was both so much my mother -- curious, well able to keep herself amused, good with tools, never particularly concerned about the practical -- and so not my mother -- methodical, tidy, a risk taker, and (perhaps most of all) only three years old.

I hope that I remember to tell my children such stories of their own childhoods when they are older. I hope that I may one day tell such stories to my children's children.

More than that, I hope that I can learn to be better at the being, less frantic about the going.

For so long, I have had goals -- go to college, go to graduate school, get married, have children... large milestones and small challenges alike have kept me driven and focused. At what point, though, Ruskin makes me wonder, do I stop feeling like I must keep moving towards the next goal and just start enjoying today? When am I already at the place I've been trying to reach? What if I wake up one day and find out that that place is in fact already in my past?

Ruskin is so right: there is always more to see, more to read, more to do, more places to go. There are bigger goals to conquer, faster speeds to run. But at what price? Perhaps at the price of missing what you're seeing now.

When I was in college, I did my junior year abroad, and I spent my spring vacation traveling on the trains with my best friend. At some point, we found ourselves in a train compartment with a family from Texas. Everything about them was big and loud -- their clothes, their hair, their voices, their manners. We were somewhere in the South of France at the time, and we were lamenting that we did not have time in our itinerary to go to Paris on our way to Italy. "No time?!" the father boomed. "Honey, we were just in Paris. It don't take that much time. We've got it down to a science. I'll tell you how to do it. We take a night train in, see, so we don't have to pay for a hotel. We get there real early in the morning, and we jump right into seeing all the things you gotta' see. In Paris, we saw the Eiffel Tower, of course, and the Louvre, and the Arch de Triumph. We ate some food, saw some more, stayed up real late, and then jumped on another train." He took it as a point of personal triumph, a real reason for pride that, as he put it, "you don't need more'n 24 hours in any city in Europe. No reason to dawdle."

In Paris.

There's no reason to dawdle in Paris?

According to this man, you can see all of Paris in 24 hours. Having ridden past the major monuments in that time, I suppose it is strictly true that you can say you've seen much of Paris. But you don't know Paris. You haven't eaten a chocolate croissant hot and fresh just as the sun is peeking over the horizon. You haven't wandered lost down a quiet street and discovered a beautiful garden. You haven't struggled with the language or had a policemen hit on you. You haven't had numerous generous souls try to direct you or give you restaurant advice. You haven't gotten any kind of taste of the culture. Even at twenty years old, I knew it was better to skip Paris entirely, save it for a trip that would really do it justice, rather than to skim through it with a cursory glance.

Thinking about Ruskin's words, I worry that I am letting my life become that Texan's Paris. That I am dashing through, glimpsing the highlights, and not savoring enough. That the college me who was so thoroughly horrified at the notion that one could possibly absorb Paris in 24 hours has somehow given way to an adult me that is trying to accomplish that pointless feat.

I want, in the words of the inimitable John Ruskin, to use my space and time rather than simply conquer it.

I am not sure what that means for me. I am a chronic over-extender who has a hard time saying no. I am currently in the middle of no less than three book projects, with a novel that I really want to be working on patiently sitting in the wings. I have children with whom I want to share the discovery of the world. "You say to-mah-to, I say to-pay-to" Son sang to me today, and then looked up a little confused, sure something wasn't quite right. I want not just to laugh and spend the next five minutes purposefully mixing up to-may-to, to-mah-to, po-tay-to, po-tah-to, but to remember it and savor it and not feel at all as if I ought to be doing something else instead.

I want to move slower and more happily. That combination will be a hard one for me, as fast-and-goal-oriented has been my m.o. for a long long time. But I think there is something to be said for slowing down.

Ruskin abhored train travel. He thought everyone should walk everywhere or, if absolutely necessary, take a horse and carriage. Walking was best, he thought, because it enabled the person moving through the country-side really to see it and appreciate it. Traveling by train, he said, "is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel."

I've been feeling an awful lot like a parcel lately, zipping around from one busy task to the next, without taking the time to savor any of them. I have a few short-term deadlines I cannot change, but I am making a resolution for myself that come August, when all those deadlines are past, I am going to stop and get off the train for a while. Really look at the world around me. Make a new schedule and plan that has real time in it for being slow and purposeful.

Perhaps, somewhere in my near future, I should consider finally making that trip to Paris.