Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast
What if those unruly and embarrassing thoughts you fight to suppress—the angry, anxious, fearful, judgmental thoughts—are the gateway to your freedom?
In my leadership classes, I used to ask if anyone would be comfortable with a headband displaying their current thought on their forehead. Of course, no such headband exists and nervous laughter answered my question. We might think everyone else has their act together, but they don’t.
For all of us, our busy minds are often plagued by unruly, embarrassing thoughts.
The chatterbox in our mind narrates our life. We’re so familiar with it that we might think it is who we are. When the chatter becomes problematical, we search for relief. We might turn to our distraction routines—reaching for our smartphone, checking the “news,” eating, shopping, binge-watching, drugs, alcohol, or sex.
Or perhaps we might open the latest self-help books that promise, for example, the ten best ways to overcome anxiety. None of these “shortcuts”—distractions, addictions, or techniques—provide relief for very long.
Shortcuts don’t work for long because they start with the premise that we see our difficulties correctly and then try to fix things from that assumption.
Relief is not found in getting rid of troubling thoughts; that is impossible. Relief is found as we gain an understanding of the nature of our thinking.
Carl Jung wrote, “Most people confuse ‘self-knowledge’ with knowledge of their conscious ego-personalities.”
Navy Seals have a saying “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” When we feel overwhelmed, our ego-personality is in overdrive, we are in no mood to slow down to gain self-knowledge.
Yet, what if those unruly and embarrassing thoughts you fight to suppress—the angry, anxious, fearful, judgmental thoughts—are the gateway to your freedom?
What if there is nothing wrong with you?
Reading this, you might be thinking, Oh, come on, are you in the give-everyone-a-trophy school of thought?
Hardly. Starting with the axiom that nothing is wrong with you increases your capacity to make better choices.
In his book, The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton wrote, “We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.”
De Botton added, “All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer.” As an example, he writes, “Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss.”
When De Botton writes, “something is wrong” he is not saying something is inherently wrong with you. He is saying that there is something off with your beliefs and conditioned responses to life.
These “amiss” thoughts reveal our programming, our beliefs that drive the bus. Rather than resist our thinking, we can allow those thoughts to be—observe them without elaborating, judging, or justifying them. From that vantage point, we learn, and change begins.
While trekking in Nepal, the poet David Whyte stopped at a Buddhist monastery and saw a room of carved faces. In his poem “The Faces at Braga,” Whyte memorably revealed how we clench against life:
"If only our own faces would allow the invisible carver’s hand to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.
If only we knew as the carver knew, how the flaws in the woods led his searching chisel to the very core, we would smile too and not need faces immobilized by fear and the weight of things undone."
In his prose book The Three Marriages, Whyte wrote, “Once we have renounced the need to live without suffering, to be special, to be exempt from the losses and doubts that have afflicted all people since the beginning of time, we can see the difficulties of others without being afraid ourselves. Our fearful, disappointed surface face starts to fall away.”
In his classic book, The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton wrote:
Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.
Mindset Shifts U is a school of subtraction. As we slow down and stop taking shortcuts, we no longer seek to suppress what arises or justify our conditioned reactions. By practicing subtraction, we can see more clearly what Marcus Aurelius called our true Nature. From that awareness, a process of change begins, and bits of our ego fade away.
Next weekend, Mindset Shifts U begins with my overview of Meditations. Please read the introduction and the first two Notebooks (Waterfield’s term for chapters).
Each weekend, I will post an introductory post, which may also suggest a simple practice for the week.
You will learn more from the material if you try the practice and share your ideas in the weekly thread. You might ask a question or post a reaction to what I wrote. You might share an experience. You might share a favorite passage and why. You might react to another reader’s comment. Other possibilities will emerge, but the more we engage the material and each other, the richer the experiential learning will be.
In subsequent weeks, in the spirit of slow is smooth, smooth is fast, we will consider one notebook a week. So, for example, beginning February 4, we will consider Notebook 3 of Meditations. Depending upon your reactions, we may adjust our pace.
Continuing after Meditations, our learning will compound with each additional book we study. My weekly overviews and your threads are not public but only viewable to paid subscribers.
Like the students in my leadership classes who recognized the problematical nature of their thinking, we are all in the same boat. Yet, as Aurelius believed, that same boat, our Nature, means we all have a right mind and a wrong mind and the power of choice. Awareness is the true shortcut to change; with study and practice, we gain awareness.
I’m looking forward to working with you.
Mindset Shifts U Begins This Month
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