Moving at the pace of what is real

Last week I drove to Bristol for a short piece of work. The time spent in Bristol (90 minutes in total) was necessary and worthwhile, but it took most of the day to travel there and back, and a part of me kept whispering: couldn't you be doing something more productive with this time?

There's a persistent sense that time should always be optimised. And I recognise this in myself - that deep-rooted belief that a good life is a productive life. Which is quite a confession for a yoga teacher  - especially when you've just spent an hour teaching people to slow down.

Recently I've been reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, and his central idea is both confronting and strangely liberating: We will never finish everything.

However efficient we become, however organised our inbox is, the list simply fills again. Productivity doesn't solve the problem of time - it just creates room for more demands. And if the average human life really is around four thousand weeks, the question isn't how to fit everything in. The question is what we choose to give our time to. Mark Nepo writes about how easily we move through life collecting experiences like a train gathering carriages -place after place, moment after moment - until eventually we realise we've been travelling so quickly that we haven't really experienced any of them. What if we try instead to “move at the pace of what is real” -  meaning allowing ourselves to notice the moment we’re actually in, not the one to come, or the one that’s just gone by.

Yoga offers a small place to explore this. When we repeat a sequence slowly, when we stay with a posture for a few breaths longer than feels necessary, we begin to notice how quickly the mind wants to move ahead. What's next? How long left? Haven’t I done this already?

But if we soften that urge, even briefly, something else appears. The rhythm of breath. The sensation of weight in the feet. The subtle difference between this repetition and the last one. The practice becomes less like something to complete and like somewhere you’re actually inside.

Of course, real life doesn't always allow us to slow down. Sometimes we're walking the dog in the rain while mentally rewriting our to-do list because it needs to be done. Sometimes we're spending most of the day getting to Bristol and back . Sometimes we’re trying to answer emails in a supermarket queue. But even within that, there are moments when something breaks through.

This morning on my dog walk,  the air felt different. the beginnings of spring arriving. It's easier to be present when the world offers you something like that.

Maybe moving at the pace of what is real doesn't mean doing less. It might simply mean being present for the moments we're already living - even the ones that feel ordinary, or inconvenient, or like something to get through.

I'm still working on this. But I think that's the point.