"Slow down, you crazy child, take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while..."

Everything in our world moves fast.
It forces us to move as fast, if not faster.
It's all about speed - you have to move quickly, just to keep up.
Fast is better, we learn: work fast, drive fast, learn fast, live fast.
Except that's wrong.

"I can't. I can't go on. It goes too fast. We don't have time to look at one another... Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you... Do any human beings realize life while they live it?-- every, every minute?"

Thornton Wilder wrote that in Our Town 70 years ago. And the world's gotten even faster since then.

Life goes by so fast as it is. Why do we want to go even more quickly through it?
How can we enjoy it when we go through at such a velocity, we barely perceive what's happening around us?
We're moving at millions of milles a moment in, out, around our surroundings.
How can we get anything out of it if we can't even slow down enough to see it?

We move slowly when we're little. Or rather, at our own paces.
Then school starts. Pre-school, pre-K, kindergarten.
Elementary school. Middle school. High school.
Push push push push push. Get through fast and efficiently. Do as much as you can in that small period of time so you can keep going.
College. Work work work. Gotta get a job then. Or go on to post-graduate studies. Either way, there'll be a lot of people to impress on the way. After all, you still have to meet a life partner.
Get a job. Get married. Have kids. Now you have a family, and you have to move through their lives at the speed of light, too. You can sleep when you're dead.
Oh wait. At the speed you're going, you're going to be dead by the time you're 50.
But that's what you get for trying to live successfully in such a fast-paced world.
And that's just for society's definition of success. These days, success isn't analogous to greatness. And it isn't analogous to happiness, either.

"At that moment, I knew that success, not greatness, was the only god the world served."

If we could only forget the drive to be successful in our high-speed world.
We'd move through life at a natural pace - at our own natural paces.
We could appreciate the great things about life instead of constantly being weighed down by the negatives.
We could live, and not just exist.

"Slow down, you're movin' too fast -
You gotta to make the moment last.
Just kickin' down the cobblestones,
Lookin' for fun and feelin' groovy...

I got no deeds to do, no promises to keep,
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.
Let the morningtime drop all its petals on me.
Life, I love you, all is groovy..."

Paul Simon wrote that 40 years ago. He was right too.

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Listening to: Billy Joel - Vienna [Live Unreleased Version]