APRIL 13, 2025 – I harbor the hope that the reader who is about my age or beyond it will understand the sentiments expressed below. If you are my junior, the likelihood exists that at best you’ll lay my two cents aside for possible future reference. If you’re in the latter camp, I wholly understand: you’re like the competitive whitewater kayaker viewing an ad for Viking river cruises up and down the Danube.
That said . . .
Once you advance to a certain (older) age, you wind up on an airplane; not just any plane, but one that’s specially designed and equipped for skydivers. And guess what: though you’d never sign up for such a thing, you realize that you’re wearing a crash helmet with goggles and a parachute. In other words, you’re among the skydivers. You’re not an ordinary passenger simply along for the ride (three-point landing on the tarmac included).
When it’s your turn to look out the open doorway, staring out and down at your fate, all your hopes, dreams, and indeed, accomplishments, are instantly miniaturized by the imminent prospect of stepping out into thin air at 10,000 feet above terra firma.
But ahead of the skydiving adventure, there’s an easier way to achieve the “miniaturization” of life’s loot in exchange for a glimpse of life’s essence.
I experienced this less stressful way yesterday as I shuttled back and forth among our back porch, patio, driveway, and open garage—the various stations of my current arts-and-crafts project, namely, the design and construction of (another) intricate woodland “gnome home.”
This sort of work gives me immense pleasure. I attribute this to two central and overlapping features. First is that apart from the basic laws of gravity and intrinsic properties of the various materials involved, both blame and credit for the design, construction . . . and screw-ups, fixes, likes, dislikes, “Eureka!” moments, idea-cancellations, and oddball embellishments are entirely mine. I have absolutely no one to answer to; no judges, no juries, no critics, clients, no adverse lawyers or parties, no naysayers; not even my spouse or kids, siblings or cousins or friends. Second, I work on my own time and at my own speed.
Speed . . . Ha! More like the absence of it. The hard truth be told, when I’m working on a “gnome home,” my speed is that of a snail. The further truth is that my “slo-mo mode” is quickly (ironically) adapted to many other pursuits, such as . . . putting in and taking out the docks up at the lake or cleaning off a desk full of books, papers, and odd ball stuff or noodling a client’s conundrum and developing a solution or . . . composing a blog post. I wasn’t always a snail—though some people might’ve called me a slug=but I’ve now shifted into a different gear, which, okay, I’ll say it: it’s lower than the high gear of younger years. I should jettison my hesitancy in calling it a “slowdown,” for it reflects more an attribute of Zen than of diminished cognition. I’ve learned to shift to and savor “slow,” not because my brain can’t or is unwilling to work at a higher gear ratio, but because I’ve developed a much deeper appreciation for deeper thinking, and deeper thinking is by necessity, slower thinking.
What dissipate in the process are all expectations, self-consciousness, regrets, failures, woes and worries, and also all prior achievements, real or perceived.
But here’s the really cool part: “slo-mo mode” brings unexpected beauty to life. An example arose during yesterday’s session. At one step in the proceedings, I was sorting through a trove of small birch sticks that I’d collected up at the lake. My purpose was to find pieces with appealing funkiness for a window frame on a side of the gnome home. This was not the task for someone in a hurry. Close examination of my random stock of sticks revealed a wonderful uniqueness to each possibility; details that would’ve been missed by someone—in my younger years, ME!—in a rush. Yet, my lookout for detail—the Zen effect—was but one of the rewards of my deliberative “slo-mo mode.”
Snail speed allowed time for the thought to look up from my intense examination of birch sticks to some more distant object in the yard to give my eyes and my brain a break. My random focus just happened to land on the maple tree 20 feet yonder. Moreover, my sight landed at the very same spot at the very same instant a bluebird chose for itself. I’m not a birder, so I’m not in the know about these things. Maybe bluebirds are more common than I’m aware, but in the nearly 39 years we have lived at our current address, I’ve never seen a bluebird in our backyard—or front yard or for that matter, anywhere within miles of either. In fact, I can remember only two occasions in my entire life when I’ve seen a bluebird anywhere.
Yet, from the time I was a young kid poring through illustrated books of any sort, whenever I encountered a picture of a bluebird, I would stop to admire it. Of all the birds in the world, the bluebird was my favorite.
And yesterday, thanks to my operating in “slo-mo mode,” I caught a nice long view of that beautiful bluebird. The power of that moment was sufficient to dispel all despair about matters over which I have no control. Moreover, for a few precious beats, that little bird displaced all the grandeur (such as it was) of my works (such as they were). Before I could exchange words for a song, the bluebird took off. Effortlessly, magically, it returned to the ether from which it had appeared.
I returned to the job at hand—picking through the birch pieces until I had what I wanted: Zen on a stick. Of course, it had been there all along. I just needed to shift into “slo-mo mode” to see it.
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
