On Friday I was pulled over for doing 60 in a 40. This is part of my commute for a few months, a designated scenic two-lane road winding from southwestern Massachusetts to northwestern Connecticut.
NB, many if not most folk drive 60 on this road. But I was driving fast, too fast, I knew it. I tend to drive fast. Not reckless, but fast. Ten years in congested New Jersey, single mother with too little time, did not help what surely was a predisposition, especially those two commuting to New York on the NJT where the average speed is 80, you get the picture.
Life in rural parts has soothed some of the savage speed beast within, but there are moments, especially the past year+ when days have been long long long and time ever short short short.
I have been tearing through this commute in an effort to make time wherever I can. At that moment I needed to get to class, 12 third formers were waiting. I sat on the side of the road– so rural, there is no shoulder– and looked back at the police car behind me, wondering what was taking him (or her, I couldn’t see) so long, hurry up, give me the ticket so I can go!!!!
Unbelievable. In fact only a few minutes before I’d been thinking, as I sped along, about what felt a downward slide in my ability to gracefully juggle the teaching with the running of my business with my life. Who wouldn’t drive faster?? But this would be the response: slow down. Counterintuitive, huh.
When I was in graduate school, Milan Kundera’s slender novel La Lenteur (Slowness) came out, a meditation on slowness and remembering, speed and forgetting, right up my alley. A story of seduction set in an 18th-century chateau outside Paris, counterposed with modern-day events at the same chateau-turned-hotel. Modern day does not come off looking so good.
In the 18th-century story, the Chevalier seduced by Mme de T– to throw her husband off the trail of her true lover, the Marquis!– has a slow ride back to Paris by carriage, reflecting on his night with Mme de T. He was seduced altogether willingly, so this is not an unpleasant trip. Juxtaposed is one of the modern day characters whose disastrous evening leads him to jump on his motorcycle and race back to Paris, driving fast to leave it behind, to forget. No refection, no looking back. No rearview mirror.
You can be sure I was too much in a rush that morning to connect my speeding and subsequent rearview glances at the police car behind me to this larger theme. But not so much in a rush to not realize this stop was a red flag, a slow down, you’re moving too fast moment. I’d had a few others recently, and now was time to pay attention.
The young, cute, very nice officer finally made his way up to my window. I did not get a ticket, thank you, cute officer. But I consider myself fairly warned.
And because time, I like to imagine in my better moments, is an accordion that can be infinitely expanded so long as we remain supple in its hands and don’t resist…post-Epiphany (!) I’m going to write here daily, more briefly, going back to my original intent. For a few weeks; we’ll see.
In between, will be easing off the gas. Because when you’re moving way too fast is the moment when you really need to stop, and be still (see, Pico Iyer), xo