We are afraid of slowing down.
The systems around us have aligned our personal sense of value to a narrow definition of ‘productivity’ that keeps us constantly on the move.
It gets really uncomfortable when we question that.
Not to mention that when we slow down and ask why the seemingly straightforward unravels as you encounter the deeply interconnected nature of our existence.
In the beginning, there was a deep need to 'be productive' or 'do,’ even if we had no idea what they were doing. A sense of action felt soothing in our bodies. The idea of looking inward and questioning our own core beliefs seemed 'unproductive' and there was a lot of frustration because we were unsure of what this process would 'do for us. Despite the discomfort, we sat with and interrogated why we were feeling like we wanted to crawl out of our skin. We saw that there was a shared working definition of ‘productive’ that involved jumping in and doing that had been taught to us throughout our lives. It made things simple, we were in control. We could fix the problem. However, this desire was associated with automatic thinking - reverting to what we already knew how to do. When we tracked it in our bodies it felt tight and closed, the same energetic feel as fear and control.
The process of reflecting on and defining what they were doing and why they were doing it didn’t feel productive because it made us actually stop and reflect - and stopping was ‘bad’ and ‘a waste of time’ in our shared drive for productivity. When we began to question this thought pattern, we opened the door to deeper thinking. We saw that something ‘straightforward,’ like designing a way to cook and eat together was intertwined with nearly every societal issue in our world, and the act of creating it could bring up nearly every issue you could imagine a group could face in collaborating.
When we disconnected from the idea of a time boundary and an end goal, we asked deeper questions, and sensed the energy and emotions of the group members. When focused on the time boundary, we would abandon the structures we had put in place to live and be 'regenerative' with each other in favor of the quickest solution. This almost always defaulted to a more automatic response.
For example, when we were designing a communal cooking system, we agreed upon a consent-based process to make decisions. That meant one person would make a proposal and then everyone would consent verbally, or someone could object, and then that would be explored by the group. This process ensures all objections are fully heard, and though it takes longer, it builds deep trust within the group.
When we feel that we are working with finite time we shift into automatic ways of thinking.
Periodically, someone would become conscious of the time boundary and then the energy in the room would shift. Suddenly everyone is speaking quickly, decisions are being made with only one or two people consenting, or no proposal is being made at all. The body language around the table shifts and people begin to cross their arms or look down at the floor.
We explored why the idea of a time boundary affected our thinking. What we came to is that it was again a symptom of trying to align reality to our desires versus ourselves to reality. In reality, time is not linear, nor is it finite. There is no end goal. Whatever we are producing is something that we’ve assigned certain meaning to—that meaning can be something we attach our identity and worth to, or not, it’s our decision. By shifting our perception of time and productivity from a finite resource focused on an ‘end’ to an infinite resource focused on living the process as a playful experiment, we became more aligned to the reality of nature and we moved more with ease and felt we had time to keep the commitments we had made to dig deeper and be aware of what was coming up in ourselves and each other.
Based on this insight, we shifted the Experiment; we decided to allow conversations to take as long as they needed to and detach from the idea of a certain endpoint. We focused on the process as our teacher rather than striving for a symbolic goal or output. We relaxed into it and were more at ease and more creative because of it. Many of you may say, “But that could never be done in real life, there are so many things we HAVE to do by a certain deadline.” Anytime we think we have to do something we can question it. We can change our relationship with the ‘have tos’ in life in order to create space to think more creatively and regeneratively.
Slowing down creates more longevity
Like in regenerative agriculture, there is an initial period of transition where things just take longer, however, once an ecosystem is up and running it can produce as much food as industrial agriculture. We feel like by rushing into doing we will go faster, however, soon the lack of a shared reality and trust inevitably reality rears its ugly head.
When we stopped to ask ourselves why we were doing what we were doing we created a shared reality that helped us be able to quickly make decisions in the rest of the process of creating a cooking system.
By putting the work in to slow down, we built a container of trust that allowed for continued creation and evolution, which ultimately outlasts the sprint to action (let us all remember The Tortoise and the Hare).