Slowdown

We wake up in the morning, go to loo, brush teeth, have coffee/tea, bath, travel, go to college/office, attend lectures/meetings, work, come back home, spend time with friends/family, dine and sleep. There are a lot of things that we do physically which are voluntary and lot of things which happen involuntarily. Lets keep aside involuntary things for a while and look at voluntary actions. Say, brushing teeth, having coffee, bathing and similar ones. Can we slowdown the voluntary activities? Can we brush the teeth carefully, slowly, enjoy the whole process consciously, and feel each splash of water on the face? Thoughts are involuntary; they come to us like waves in an ocean. They just keep coming, endlessly. They might rule over your slowed down actions, its ok. When conscious again put your heart in your slow down. Can you wait and observe the sensations in your mouth just after brushing your teeth and before you sip a hot cup of tea and kill the earlier sensation for a new one?

We enjoyed school recess, we don’t like recession! We don’t like market slowdown, it hurts. But this slowing down of daily actions can be a different experience. It can be done now, while reading this. Slow down, just sloooow down!

In computers there are debuggers to debug(weed out bugs from) computer programs. I use to work on a debugger called SoftICE. It was an amazing tool for debugging Windows BSOD’s (you know Blue Screens?). Instead of causing Blue-Screen this tool grabs the CPU and halt the whole process. When the system was halted I was able to see the state in which CPU is, what were the RAM memory contents etc. After seeing ‘what-is’ and knowing ‘what-should-be’ debugging became easier. It was all possible because the system was halted (slowed down to 0 speed.)

Notice here that seeing ‘what-is’ is extremely important. A slowed down action or a thought helps us see ‘what-is’ really is. But, our whole thought process seems to be interested in looking at destinations, goals and what-should-be. Can you slowdown a few activities daily, say, taking 5 breaths slowly or chewing 5 bites of you dinner with your eyes closed without hurrying up for getting the next bite ready, or 5 times you blink your eyes or taking 5 mugs of hot water on your body when you take your bath?

Enjoy the slowdown only then going fast will be a fun, fun with more clarity than what it was!