Being “slow” is an insult in this society we’ve built.
Whether it’s “slow” at learning, a “slow” walker, or even being a “slow” eater!
I have always struggled with the parts of me that felt slow in some way - which, paradoxically, always seemed linked to my intrinsic impatience and combined with my bigger-picture thinking and feeling.
I am today years old - 44! - and only beginning to understand the real truth of all of this for myself, and I want to share because it feels like it might be quite barrier-shattering for others like me: the sensitives, the empaths, the natural creatives, the FEELERS…
My mind works fast - and is most definitely processing a billion different things in parallel. But the output is typically slow. In academia and in the workplace, this felt like a flaw. When I went self-employed, and started hanging in entrepreneurial groups, I felt even more shamed for not making FAST DECISIONS, the rhetoric being that “IF YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW” and “fast-action-takers ARE BOSS!”.
That always felt ick to me, but I couldn’t articulate why, or how my own needs and approach actually felt better long term. I just felt ashamed of “being slow”.
Now I fully understand. My intuition works very much as a whole, and decades of trauma and gaslighting disconnected those parts most required for the whole. I could absolutely KNOW an answer to anything in my soul and body, but it couldn’t connect easily to my mind - too often my nervous system and conditioning got in the way.
The reason this is mammoth to me is that most “fast action takers” are doing so from part of themselves - usually their mind or ego. Not the whole. I know because I see the pattern repeating over and over in the entrepreneurial space, along with the fallout…
But equally, it IS possible to act fast on your intuition…
Only, your intuition is built up from billions of moments and packets of information - personal, ancestral and collective. Your intuition is - by nature - NOT fast.
I’ve come to freaking LOVE this paradox, but it is also vastly misunderstood - and by extension, abused by spiritual entrepreneurs calling for “those who KNOW to act now!” ***I have done this myself***
Here’s the paradox in actual real-time, real-world activity:
Several weeks of feeling like nothing is moving and absolutely nothing is being connected, shifted or created;
2-4 weeks of high-intensity, multidimensional and expansive connections, insights, influx of ideas, absolute confidence in instant action taking, and creation off-the-charts!
What is even more paradoxical is that the latter can 100% be taken slowly and pleasurably, revelling in every moment! Once upon a time I believed I had to be manic, as if the creation energy would run out and I’d be left in the void again.
If you identify as a “slow” processor, please know this is a misnomer. I no longer see or feel it as SLOW but as FULL.
When I am processing “slowly”, I am in fact allowing all the myriad pieces of information percolate and create natural connections of their own accord, and not through my conditioning. I am also creating “extraneous” connections and insights not necessarily related to the singular thing at hand, because my soul is pulled by and towards my bigger picture.
I - and you, I suspect, if you’ve read this far - am/are in fact creating whole universes of wonder instead of drawing a simple line between pint A and point B.
We are not “slow”. We are infinite connectors, feelers and creators.
Do you relate? What are your thoughts, feels and experiences on this one?
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