I heard this in a podcast sometime this spring from Kate Bowler when she interviewed John Swinton, and I loved it so much that I had to post it here:
Kate Bowler: I don’t think I thought a lot about slowing down until I was forced to slow down, and then it was miserably slow. It was the space between scans, and just the inability to live in future tense forced me to notice things. But, that was one of the most intense educations that I’ve ever received in figuring out what to love, because now there’s a weird… there’s a weird slowness, especially. I try to do this thing where every day I notice what the big moment is and it’s almost always something hilarious my son has done. I was trying to have a meeting, a very important meeting, and I was on my phone, and he’s in his little jammies, and he crawled up on my lap and he looked deeply into my eyes and he whispered, “Is now a good time to talk about lizards?”
John Swinton: And of course it was.
Kate Bowler: You’re right, I need to get off this phone. Now is the right time to talk about lizards.
John Swinton: That’s right. That’s great.
recap at the end of the episode below:
Kate Bowler: Carpe diem. Seize the day. I think I always thought that was an imperative about time. Go get them tiger. Get at it. Speed up already! Choose the passing lane. When I listen to John, I’m reminded to slow down. I need to stop flying by at the speed of anxiety and deadlines and exhaustion. As John writes, God’s time is gentle, generous. It moves at the speed of love. In God’s time there is enough, enough to sit down and draw a breath, to look more deeply into the eyes of people who we are lucky enough to love, and feel the secondhand of the clock stop ticking. I don’t know, that kind of time suddenly makes me feel a little more human, a little more able to see others who need to live like me in a different time, to live soul to soul, to ask ourselves, “Is now a good time to talk about lizards?”. I hope so.
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