Addicted to speed, love the Adrenalin rush?
The burn of months of full on days, little sleep, insatiable
doingness?
High from feeling super busy, hard to reach, important? Ego out of control, but under the illusion of total control.
Can’t sit still, and if you could, why would you? Sitting still is for other people. You have things to do, people to speak to, stuff to create.
Physical symptoms. Heart racing, mind moving like a hummingbirds wings. Miss meals, or eat crap because eating is not so important. At some level you are exhausted, but you have blocked this from being part of your awareness.
Everything is fast…eating, sleep, phone calls, meetings, sex. Sleep is either that of a dead person or like skating across thin surfaces.
Addicted to speed is a legitimate addiction. Like alcohol, sex and drugs. And all addictions are a way to block access to heartfelt feelings and experiences. If I stay busy I won’t have to feel what I am avoiding? I can shut it down, suppress it, deny it, ignore it.
But not forever. Nothing is able to go full speed forever. Not even a person with super powers. At some point we will break. Or get very sick, or be hit by a real or imagined Mack truck.
Speed saves us the pain of stopping.
Stopping is feeling. And for speed addicts, feeling is what you don’t want. Even in our speed addiction we have no room for feeling joy, or love…or happiness…
Speed also demands that all people in your life are moving as fast as you are. If they are not, then we loose them. Speed based relationships are transactional. There is no time for deep connection. Frankly, deep connection is part of what we are avoiding.
With speed we loose the ability to tune into the other more slowly moving parts of life. We loose the ability to connect with the changing of the seasons, the growing up of a child, the needs of a friend.
We miss the larger patterns that can only be seen when stopping. Our ability to have a high systemic overview is diminished, or lost. Our sight is only able to grasp the immediate, the urgent, the noisy.
And while we avoid, in our endless haste, our feelings, we deny the slower aspects of our self. The love of touch, of taste, or sensuality. But also those parts of us that live in feelings…our vulnerabilities and softness, beauty, silence…the parts of us that are broken, our shadow..the always ever present stillness.
We exile the parts of us that make us human and whole. We are the speed zombies. The fast moving dead.
When we finally stop, we have no place to anchor. We feel adrift in an alien world. And in the vacuum of stillness in rushes the feelings…the loneliness, the pain, the yearning…a tidal wave stronger than we can bare.
Now we need support, and love, and all the things an addict in detox needs. Great coaching from someone able to stand witness to the maelstrom we are caught in.
If we stop long enough, and hold our nerve, we may just begin to feel moments of joy. Or the whisper of yearnings long denied. Life may begin again.
In truth, life will finally start when we stop moving so endlessly fast.
*are you addicted to speed?
*do you get high on your own self importance of busy~ness?
*are you able to take a weekend off…no technology…no internet, phone, nothing to do?
*what are you avoiding?
*if you keep this up…this speed…what is the name of the Mack truck? Divorce, illness, accident, loosing all your money? And don’t pretend you don’t know…all the signs are already there…texting while driving, eating crap…and zero intimacy with your spouse…
*what is your stopping point? And who is going to support you while you stop?
