Embrace the Pace

I grab my phone. I open the messages app. I find the person I want to text. And then I start typing.

And pretty often, as I start stitching the words together, the typos start flying. Sure, autocorrect does its best, but when you're texting your wife, your siblings, your close friends, you're not always typing things that autocorrect's understanding of the English language can handle. So then autocorrect miscorrects a not-word into something else, and we've reached the cusp of incomprehensibility.

So there I stand, gasping exasperatedly at the frustration of texting. So I backspace. I tap the red squiggly line. I retype. And eventually a five-second task snowballs into a minute-long debacle.

And I think to myself, if I just slowed down my typing a little then I'd probably make very few errors. I could be more efficient and direct and put my phone down faster. Instead, my fingers move more quickly than my brain (even as I type this, I misspell the word as "figners"), and mistakes cause me to backtrack and try again. I often think slowing down would help things a lot but rarely remember to do it.

Such an adjustment is much more easily said than done. I need to look no further than the day-to-day of my job, where I am regularly rushing tasks, choosing quantity over quality because of the pressure of what all has to get done - rushing a lesson plan to get it outlined and plugged into our school-wide template files rather than taking the time to measure it out carefully with excellent organization; rushing through student Mass ministries assignments and missing conflicts that cause me to assign students who won't be present to do their jobs; starting spontaneous conversations with colleague-friends when I am en route somewhere and not having the patience and relaxed attitude to let the conversation wrap up naturally before moving to the door and forcing it to end.

I feel like this is one of those ideals that hangs over me at work, at home, with grad school, and surely will loom over attempting fatherhood and family. Quality vs. quantity. Doing a lot vs. doing a few things well. Enjoying many things vs. savoring a favorite few.

It's a constant goal, an ongoing aspiration, yet one that's rarely achieved and realized. It will be something to try to continually consider even if never accomplish. But hey, as an idealist and optimist with silly-high expectations for most of my life, it fits the bill.

I was finally getting out for a run yesterday, after kicking that can down and down the road as after-school meetings and too cold of temperatures (if I had a race to train for, maybe I'd be heartier; for now, I don't run if it dips under 25º!) left me with easy excuses to not lace up and get outside.

After I got dressed - tights and long-sleeve, thumb-holed pullover included - I grabbed my phone to line up the podcast I'd listen to while running my 5k. I scrolled to Serial from WBEZ/NPR and found the newest episode ready for consumption - and next to it, also a 2min podcast update. So I clicked to download my new episode for the run but also played the 2min update off the external speakers of the phone while I tied my shoes.

As the familiar voice of Sarah Koenig started talking, I sat down to slip on my running shoes and tie them up. With my attention split between listening and tying my shoes, I missed the knot-loop as my hands rushed through the action of crossing the bows. Then I started over and missed again. I had to stop, drop the laces, take a beat, and then resume my attempts more slowly.

As I eventually succeeded at tying my shoes (hooray!), I learned from the podcast update that the reporters and producers were finding more and more intriguing content related to their season-long storytelling on an American POW. They decided that instead of throwing it all together to add an extra episode to the season, they would stretch out the rollout season and give themselves more time to finish it. Sarah said that if it was worth doing, they felt it was worth doing right, worth doing well. So new episodes would now come out every two weeks while the staff worked to create the right amount of episodes for the season and do so in the best way.

The coincidence of these things was not lost on me as I stretched out and prepared to get my lazy butt out and running. Here was a profound and exemplary case of people embracing quality and proper pace to do something better, to do it right instead of fast.

May God grant us the ability to embrace a pace that keeps our hearts open to loving well and receiving love well from others. Here's to being able to get things done fast when we need to, but also to being able to slow down to get things done right.