Delightfully Slow

The other day, my husband, Andy, and I offered to pick up my mother, who’d been away on holiday, from the train station and take her and her heavy luggage home. Arriving early at the station, we decided we had time for a coffee before meeting the train.

The screen door of the Primula Cafe slammed shut behind us as we approached the counter to order two regular decaf lattes. While waiting for the barista to fulfil our order, my nose rose, and I inhaled deeply: a delicious aroma filled the cafe. “Fish and chips!” 

I looked around, noticing the cafe packed with happy customers wolfing down huge portions of fish and chips. Was this the special of the day? Was it Fish Friday?

We sometimes have fish on Fridays, though we usually choose canned tuna, not crispy beer-battered fillets served with large portions of chips. Tuna mornay is our easy go-to sacrifice dish of the week. 

During Lent, I noticed a sign at the entrance to our supermarket: Barramundi! Get Your Fish for Lent! 

“If we eat barramundi during Lent, we won’t be making much of a sacrifice,” I observed. We don’t often buy this kind of fish. It’s far too expensive.

It won’t be long before that fish sign is back outside the supermarket. Lent with Easter on its heels, is almost here. Well, that’s what it looks like in the bakery department. The day after Boxing Day, we saw Easter buns in the supermarket. The Easter eggs will probably arrive next week.

Christmas is over at the shopping centre. The swags of glittery baubles and the floating silver reindeer were removed from the ceiling as soon as everyone had bought their gifts.There was no need to take the tree down. No one took the time to erect it. What happened to the Christmas season? Once upon a time, we celebrated for weeks. Then, Christmas was reduced to twelve days. For a while, it lasted until New Year’s Day. Now we get a single day. Well, at least that’s what it looks like if you venture out into the world. At home, it’s a different story. Our tree will be here for a long time yet. Usually, it stays put until the Baptism of Our Lord.

The world is travelling at a faster and faster pace, isn’t it? We get caught in the flow, external forces pulling us along. There’s no time to savour the seasons. The next big thing is approaching. And the next one. 

À couple of days before Christmas, before we’d even celebrated this feast, the shops emptied their shelves of festive items and replaced them with Back-to-School things. Whose big idea was that? Did the store manager expect the children to exclaim excitedly, “We can’t wait for Christmas to be over so we can return to school!”? Maybe he hoped they’d pester their parents, saying, “Can I have a new backpack? And a packet of pencils? Oh, look, a maths book! It’s just what I want. Can I have it? Please?”

It’s so easy to get caught up in the fast-moving current of life, isn’t it? The future is pushed into our faces. We find ourselves thinking about what’s ahead instead of enjoying what’s in front of us. We forget to savour each moment. We must hurry. We’re so busy. There’s so much to do! Each day, week, and month passes in a blur. And when we arrive at the last day of the year, we look back and realise we’re exhausted even though we didn’t do all we wanted. Despite our intentions, we failed to pray constantly, love deeply, and savour the delights of each day. There just wasn’t time.

A few months ago, I read John Mark Comer’s book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World:

“Who am I becoming?”

 That was the question nagging pastor and author John Mark Comer. Outwardly, he appeared successful. But inwardly, things weren’t pretty. So he turned to a trusted mentor for guidance and heard these words:

 “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life.”

 It wasn’t the response he expected, but it was—and continues to be—the answer he needs. Too often we treat the symptoms of toxicity in our modern world instead of trying to pinpoint the cause. A growing number of voices are pointing at hurry, or busyness, as a root of much evil.

 Within the pages of this book, you’ll find a fascinating roadmap to staying emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world.

Here are a few quotes I highlighted from the book:

But love is painfully time-consuming. All parents know this, as do all lovers and most long-term friends. Hurry and love are incompatible.

For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

Each moment is full of goodness. Why are we in such a hurry to rush on to the next one? There’s so much here to see, to enjoy, to gratefully receive, to celebrate, to share. As the poet William Stafford put it, “What can anyone give you greater than now?” 

Andy and I return to our car with our takeaway coffees from the Primula cafe, and as we’re taking our first sips, we hear my mother’s train is late. It won’t arrive for a long time yet. “That’s okay,” I say. We’re not in a hurry. We have coffee and each other. We can wait.

So my love and I sip coffee and savour and chat to one another. It’s an unexpected, delightfully slow moment in our day.

Photo

This cafe image was taken by Nafinia Petra, Unsplash

So, I’m wondering…

Have you read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry? When will you will take down your Christmas tree? And do you have a favourite go-to meal for the ordinary Fridays of the year?

One last thing: it’s the last day of 2023. Happy New Year!