By Susan Wordal
Have you ever noticed how some people seem to be in a real hurry, no matter what they are doing, while others are content to just move at the pace they want? Both types can be equally frustrating at times. I guess it just depends on how it strikes you at any given moment.
Funny thing, but there seem to be more phrases regarding the pitfalls of being fast rather than slow.
• The hurrier I go, the behinder I get
• Act (Marry) in haste, repent in leisure
• Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast (Wm. Shakespeare)
• Unreasonable haste is the direct road to error (Moliere)
• Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste (Benjamin Franklin)
Consider the old tale of the Tortoise and the Hare. Aesop had a way of telling a story that stands the test of time. We can be like the Hare and hurry forward, rushing to get there, but maybe being distracted along the way, or thinking we’re so far ahead because of our speed that there’s no way we can lose. Then we take a little nap and OOPS!, we’re behind. Sometimes, it is those who plod along, slow and steady, not rushing, but being careful and knowing the goal, who “win the race”.
This story strikes me these days when I think about how people behave. When I was a kid, the speedy thing was making a phone call…if you had a pushbutton phone. But when I was visiting my grandparents, I had to contend with the old rotary dial phone. So, to use the phone, you had to slow down while you waited for the dial to finish its rotation. And, you had to know the number or you had to look it up in the phone book. As you watched shows like “Star Trek”, you wished you could just say the number, or the name of the person, and the phone would dial it for you.
TA-DAH! Today we can do many of those things that seemed so impossible on those old sci-fi tv shows. (Except the transporter, they still need to figure that one out!) Everything is faster. You don’t have to wait for a letter when a fax or email will do. In fact, you don’t have to deal with faxes much at all, since email works every bit as well and you can save paper, or not deal with the old fax paper which smudged and would get creased and marked up if you folded it or drew a fingernail across it. Photos are digital and you don’t have to wait a week to get them developed in order to share them.
The down side? Yep, there’s a down side. We have come to expect that information is at our fingers and we can have everything done yesterday. We’ve come to expect everyone has a cell phone and they should pick up when we call! We get exasperated when we get voicemail (what we used to call the answering machine) and have to leave a message. We’ve become rude when an item we want isn’t available in the store and it will take a week to get it in. We don’t want to stand in line to mail a package. People think it’s great fun to manipulate photos to alter the truth of the camera lens. And just because we can send it out as soon as it’s finished on the computer doesn’t mean we should. Once you push that send button, it’s difficult if not impossible to recall it when you realize you sent that to your Uncle or your best friend and you didn’t mean to, or it had an attachment you DON’T want your mother or grandmother to see.
I think maybe we need to slow it down just a notch. We need to think about whether we did the job fast or we did the job right. We need to think about whether our haste will mean we have to re-do all that work because of an initial error or the initial idea was flawed in some way. How will we feel if the email we typed in anger is being sent to the wrong person or the text message we send is saying No when we meant Yes or vice versa? And how will you feel if that photo you know should be private gets attached to something and goes out into the electronic universe.....and your mother or your grandmother sees it?
Speed isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes slower gets it done right.