Have you noticed?

People seem to be in a big hurry, moving faster by the day. It doesn’t matter if they are going somewhere in their car, are calling to set up an appointment, or have just met someone they think could be the love of their life. There is an intense push to get on with it, to achieve the goal, to demand life instantly obey. All that movement, that agitation, is enough to set the world on fire, or at least the more susceptible parts.

As within; so without.

Can you feel it: the stress, the striving, the unwinnable fight with life. It is immensely tiring to be one-pointedly focused on making the deal, on beating the odds, on narrowing the gap between today and tomorrow, on arriving before you’ve even departed.

Why do you suppose we are in such a god-awful hurry? Have we not yet learned to enjoy the journey, realizing there is no true destination, or at best it is always changing? It seems not.

We are missing so much, the soft and gentle get to know you, the graceful flowering friendship that kindles tidbits of unexpected understanding and spreads tentacles of precious connection: all the delightful foreplays of life that give us so many fortuitous reasons for living.

Getting nowhere together, discovering all the cracks and crevices within each other, learning what prompts another to dance in the rain as well as the bright sunshine, that’s every bit as important as brokering the deal, whatever the deal may be — in fact, more so.

There is a gentleness in going slow, in savoring each breath of exploration, in creating the unbreakability of true communion. Spending time, the thing we seem to not have enough of, setting aside the desire to complete, to win, to get there, and give of our time, to act in seeming contradiction to our own interests, creates the breakthroughs we so desperately seek.

It is the secret behind anything we’d like to see last. To create a binding contract, one that requires no signatures or lawyers, one that stands and is perpetuated by the power of union, we must know one another, care about each other, see another as ourself.

It’s one small step towards the realization that there is no other. There never was. Caught up in the frenzied meness, a true meanness, there is no possibility of creating anything but more dissonance until we slow down and genuinely meet one another.

We seem to be living in a broken contract, one where the other doesn’t matter, where an other doesn’t hold any weight in automated action-reaction living. We see it on the highways, in the school yard, in politics, in all our disposable relationships. Anywhere we look, if we look with open eyes, we see it.

We’re living life at the speed of disintegration, disintegrating caring and connection, moving too fast to get to know each other, to find the ever-present reasons to honestly care about one another, the infinite reasons. We don’t have the opportunity to learn that there is more commonality than difference.

Mistakenly, we think if we move fast enough, we might not feel the fear that stalks us, that if we fill our lives with things to do, we won’t have to face that inner dread that we are missing something, something huge.

The wheel spins faster each time we look away, each time we skip right past the knot in our guts. Each time we push life away, it picks up speed, building inertia. Eventually it is bound to toss us out of the game.

Maybe there is no disposable relationship, not even one. What if every time we reject another, we are rejecting a part of ourselves? What if it actually hurts us when we do, like cutting off an arm, a toe, and ear? Maybe that’s what the pain is all about, the ache of dismembering ourselves, the death by a billion cuts. Our hearts and souls are crying out for us to stop, to stop the killing, to end the war against one another.

Maybe us hippies were right. Make love, not war. Slow down to the speed of love.