Adagio

I read a book a few years ago called Chasing Slow by Erin Loechner, and I remember feeling like this idea of pursuing a slower pace was so profound and beautiful, something that resonated deep within me.  Yet, as I set about my days and plan for things ahead, the pace of my life feels anything but slow.  Some days I try to tuck into that intention by pulling out a book, cozying up with a warm blanket, making a cup of hot tea.  But I'm quickly reminded of my to-do list piling up as I indulge in a good book, or I check my work e-mail and see that there is a form that needs to be filled out urgently for patient to get their medication on time.  

As much as I try to slow things down, it feels like there is an internal metronome that is set to allegro, or fast and quick.  To try to change the metronome to adagio, or slow, feels like you have to break the whole thing open-- ripping out its inner parts and reconstructing the whole thing over again.  Can you really just change the tempo by a quick switch on the metronome? It feels like making something entirely new to me, and some days I feel that I need to do this with the tempo of my life. 

The work I do is certainly intended to be done slowly, as having end-of-life discussions with patients seems cruel to rush through, and probably pretty inhumane, if you ask me.  Yet the pressure of meeting billing goals, getting home to chart before the end of the day, making time for all of the follow-up phone calls I'll need to make before day's end sometimes makes me feel like I'm racing through important conversations with patients.  I check myself and recognize that this talk of death should come slowly-- we are walking along slowly, an adagio pace-- as we talk about breathing machines, breaking ribs with CPR and puncturing organs, plastic tubes that go in your stomach to provide essential nutrients. Or when we are talking about the cancer eating away at someone's body-- is it eating it away at a slow, progressive, adagio kind of pace? Or is it racing through, popping up with new tumors here and there, aggressively taking the place of normal cells at an allegro sort of tempo?

There are other parts of my life that I wish would move at more of an allegro pace, but here we are moving as slowly as I can imagine.  I thought for certain that by the age of 31, I'd be settled in my long-term city, in our forever home, with my husband, three dogs, and four kids. I thought we'd be bustling with activity-- running from soccer practice to ballet class and picking up the dry cleaning on the way, all while I took calls from my phone to send in prescriptions for patients on the after-hours line. I thought the wondering about what would be would probably fade away-- that I wouldn't be thinking too much about how many girls' and how many boys' rooms we needed in the house, how many bunk beds and how many kids you can squeeze into a bedroom, how many Christmas stockings to hang by the fireplace and how many college tuitions and first cars to budget for. 

But this part of my life moves slowly, and some days I see the people moving by me at the quicker pace-- they're zooming by on the way to basketball practice and dressing all the kids in their Sunday best as they pile them into the car and zipping away for family vacation at the beach, while those of us not yet there feel like it's just taking our whole lives to ever be there.  One day I realized that some of my friends are already finished building their families, and we're sitting on the edge wondering if or when we'll ever get started. But the pace we're moving at is the slow one, the adagio.  And while we count out the steps and pace it out, listening to the metronome ticking in the background, I'm able to find the beauty in the slow.  Friends who are in a different place in life tell me I'll miss this one day.  

The question looms-- is this the pace we move at for the rest of our lives, always hoping and wishing? Or will the conductor give us the quicker flick of the baton one day? Will we build slowly, an accelerado, a poco a poco, little by little? From what I can tell, we're at the mercy of the conductor, and the conductor is moving the piece along at a pace we'll call rubato-- at the pleasure or discretion of the conductor.  I so desire for things to move a piacere-- a tempo at the discretion of the performer.

So we sit and we wait and follow the direction of the conductor.  Remembering that there is a time for everything-- a season for every activity under heaven a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plan and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh (Ecclesiastes 3).  And remembering that our lives are orchestrated by the author of time, who moves at the exact pace He means to move at, allowing space for growing and stretching and learning from a different tempo that is all His own.