Slow Down Time!

Transcript (Edited)

Hello, everybody. Hope you’re doing well. I’m doing well. I’ve been on the road quite a bit the last month, really. But it’s good to be back settled again.

When I was on the road, I got an opportunity to meet some of y’all, right? It’s really cool when you come up to me and say, “Hey, I saw your Substack, I like your Substack.” It’s really meaningful to me to hear things that are meaningful to you, that have helped, that have somehow advanced your thinking or the way that you be in the world. So it’s really cool. It’s hard traveling from place to place, but it’s really cool actually having an opportunity to hear from you.

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Time, Technology, and Slowdown

Today I want to talk about time and your relationship with time, my relationship with time, our relationship with time, and how frenzy and technology and things of life can really disrupt and distort our perception of time.

As I said, I was traveling when my wife Nedra sent me a text that the internet is out. I was like, “Okay, I’ll check on it when I get home, call the tech people or whatever”. When I got home, sure enough, the internet was out. I called them, and they said, “Well, we are not going to be able to come out for a couple of days”.

No internet for a couple of days. I was frustrated. We were all frustrated because my son does a lot of stuff online, my niece does a lot of things online, and my wife and I work online. So we really rely heavily on internet service at the house.

In a similar way, I don’t know if you’ve ever had your electricity go off. When your electricity goes off, there’s a certain amount of surrender. You’re frustrated for a little while, but then you’re just kind of like, “We’ll have to figure it out.” You get candles, you go eat out, you just figure it out. After you surrender to the fact that you don’t have electricity, your mind, your whole world shifts, and things slow down. You be differently in your house, you be differently with each other.

My electricity didn’t go out—my internet went out—but it was exactly like the experience of having your electricity go out.

Playing Spades and Dominoes

One evening, typically we’d be watching TV. I’d be watching TV news on the TV. Nedra would be in the room looking at emails. My son would be downstairs doing something. We would all be separate in the house on the internet doing something. But this particular night, because we didn’t have the internet, we couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t really watch TV. I couldn’t respond to emails. Nedra couldn’t respond to emails.

So, I picked up a book—a book that I had just been meaning to get to. I started reading this book, sipping a glass of wine. Nedra sauntered over from the back and said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Reading. What do I look like I’m doing?”

Then she said, “You want to play a game?” I was like, “Play a game?” Now, she knows that I’m not a board game person; I don’t like games much. She said, “Let’s play spades.” I said, “No, I don’t want to play spades. I’ll play dominoes, whatever”.

So she went and got the dominoes. We went to the dining room, and we played dominoes, and it was beautiful. We laughed, we talked smack to each other. I beat her, by the way. I beat her really good in Dominoes. The time that we had, the distractions in our life—the things that were urgent because we had to get to them through our emails, through our responses—kind of drifted away to our moment of playing Dominoes. And it was beautiful.