Running Out Of Time?

It’s everywhere and constant. Noise and rush. There is always some noise and we are always rushed. Cars, people, phones, music or someone’s building something. I think it is interesting to watch people deal with it. How we start rushing. How the buzzing gets to us and even before we have to deal with the hectic day to day issues in our jobs or lives we have already a totally different pace than we would normally have.

When talking to people most of them are looking forward to a getaway to a beautiful peaceful place. Somewhere where the hectic of their day to day business will not be around and where ‘it will be still’. Where nobody will rush them, no noise will be heard. The word peaceful is used so often to explain the perfect place for a vacation. And still when we are home we tend to ignore this obvious longing. We try to block it out try to ignore it.

Whenever I go outside early in the morning I feel surprised about how quiet everything is. You hear the birds and that is about it. Only one hour later it is a different story. The builders on the other side of the street are busy working and the mom’s are on the way to school to drop off their kids either by car or on foot. The streets are busier and for some reason there seems to be a buzz which is not going away until late in the evening. And we live in a quiet area…

I don’t sleep well when in a busy city, when they noise never stops. When there is this constant humming from whatever is moving and going on out there. I grew up in the country. It was quiet. Most of the time. The ‘noise’ we had were the snow plows in winter and the cowbells in summer and fall. I gradually moved further and further into ‘noise’ and I feel it affects your mood as well.

The more noise there is the more rush you feel, the more stressed out you get. There is no peace, no relaxing, no slowing down. See how it all builds up? How we start our day and it is quiet and then step by step there is more and more noise and by the time we reach work there is all this hectic and rush just rolling in on us. And it won’t stop until you get back home… if at all.

What does this do to you? Even writing this I realize how different I breathe, how shallow my breathing got. I realize how much I tense up, how rushed my tipping got.

And I remember Michael Ende’s ‘Momo’ and how the Grey Gentlemen steal the people’s time. I remember this story so well and every now and then I look around and can’t stop thinking of this book. In the book the Grey Gentlemen steal the time by tricking people into believing that you can actually save time in kind of a bank account for time. People start to rush and not enjoy life anymore because all the nice things are labeled a waste of time. So life gets dull and sterile. All the fun parts are cut out as they are a waste of time. The twist is, that the time people think they save they actually lose forever.

As I said, when I look around I very often think of this book and the deep message in this story.

Nature slows down. Look at a flock of birds, listen to them. They sleep in their tree until they all wake up and make heaps of noise before leaving for the day. They fly around communicating and in the evening they come back, probably great each other share the stories of their day and then settle down and it’s quiet.

There is nothing wrong with communication. But there needs to be a time where it gets still. There needs to be a time where it’s quiet. Where there is no noise. We need it. We need to settle down, find peace, relax. Otherwise we will not get out of this rush. I can see it on myself. I feel like I breathe faster, my heart races and I can’t stop. And it is all influenced from the outside. I guess this is why I find my peace in nature, why I can recharge. Because there is only the sound of the waves, or the wind rattling some branches, playing with the leaves. There is only the sound of nature. And it makes you slow down.

At the end of last year so many people said that the year just flew past them, that they don’t know where the time went, where the days disappeared. There were so many posts about this as well. Maybe if we stop rushing, if we cut out the noise, if we take ourselves out of this circle, we might be able to slow it all down.

Next time you walk around, try to focus on what you hear. Try to realize how it makes you feel. And then just stop. Stop and breathe. Stop and slow down. Try to not let it get to you. Cut out the noise that makes you rush. Slow down.

Take yourself to a happy place, to a place where you slow down. Where you find the time to walk slower, breathe deeper and think differently. You are in control of your thoughts. You can bring peace to your life. You just need to do it.

Inspired by this post.