The other day, I found myself in my recreational tennis class, working on my backhand. One of the coaches kept suggesting that I slow down my swing. “Slow it down?” I asked, confused. Yes, he told me. Sometimes if we’re moving too fast, we can’t pay attention to the details of what we are doing. It is too quick, too much power to make smaller adjustments. So I tried, but not very successfully. “Slow it down,” he suggested again, reminding me that I didn’t need to go for it on every shot. I was frustrated, and I told him the truth— it’s not that I was trying to be aggressive, or hit hard. My swing was what felt like neutral to me. If I was going to slow it down, it would take more mental focus and concentration than what I was doing before. So he started to coach me out loud as I was hitting: “Slowly, slow. Slowly!” It helped, a lot. My swing got better. My shots were more consistent right away.
I had to laugh at how on the nose this advice was, not just for my backhand, but also for my life. The message to slow things down, to be gentle with myself, not to push, has been a consistent one for a while now. I think God knows that what feels like neutral to me isn’t always a sustainable and healthy pace. This message has come from so many different sources— my own prayer life, from friends and loved ones, from the prayers of others, from Scripture, from poetry, from nature. It is like the whole world keeps coaching me out loud— “Slowly, slow. Be gentle. Nope, even slower!”
I went for a walk the day after my tennis class, and as I was walking through the wooded nature area near my house, I saw a a Great Blue Heron wading in the creek. I stopped to watch this beautiful bird moving gently through the water. I noticed just how slowly it moved, barely making a ripple in the water as it glided forward. It moved so slowly that I found it hard to watch. Even witnessing its glacial pace elicited a restlessness within me. I wanted to run, or shout. I felt itchy with the need to move faster than this bird. But I also had to laugh, because here it was again, another lesson in slowing down. Here was this regal bird moving through its environment with gentle ease, no doubt trying not to disturb any fish that may have been darting about at its feet. It looked so simple and so impossible at the same time.
Sometimes the harder work is found not in the speeding up and the trying harder, which is so often our default position, but instead in the slowing down. I am learning, again and again, to be gentler than I think I need to be. It takes work to override my default pace, but this is the call I continue to receive: slowly, slowly. Gently, gently. It is hard work, but I don’t do it alone. The heron reminds me, and so does a patient tennis coach. And when I manage to pull back just a little, I am usually surprised to find grace there, and that things flow a little easier than they might have.
Wellspring 