On Being Slow

I can be slow, so it should come as no surprise that it took me a long time to embrace this about myself. I can be slow to understand things. Like directions, for instance. It was my darling wife who finally pointed out to me that “rinse full strength” on our mouthwash wasn’t instructing me to swish the stuff around in my mouth as frantically as I could. Yes, I spent years thinking Listerine had intentionally and in a sort of cleverly humorous way likened my mouth to an agitator setting on a washing machine. I mean, mouthwash and washing machines, it’s a natural connection right? Because they both have the word “wash” in them and like to make things clean for you. Thus, the higher the agitation, the better the grimy bits are flushed out.  But no, it turns out this whole time they just didn’t want me to dilute their product down with water. Which I guess makes sense from a marketing point of view. Not only does it sell more product, but what sort of marketer wants to make you think about sudsy underwear every time you use their mouthwash?

Yes, I can be slow. Maybe deliberate, is perhaps a nicer way of putting it. As in: I am a “deliberate” runner.  I am also a “deliberate” writer. This is perhaps why I also have been very “deliberate” in getting back to posting here at the “Green Light.”  Because I had all these great intentions of writing about the cerebral buzz of residency and the wonders of Ireland and the lively conversations I had with my fellow Spalding writers, and I was going to post pictures, and wax poetic on Joyce and Yeats and try to articulate all these seemingly profound and philosophical thoughts I was having about the whole experience but here’s the other thing: I am not only “deliberate” with many things, I am also very easily overwhelmed. One of the things about being slow / deliberate (your choice) is that life, which has only one speed, turbo charged, does not wait for the slow to deliberate (ooh, did you catch that little language switch?). Life will plow you down if you’re not looking. And so after residency, a heady combination of exhilaration and exhaustion equaled me being overwhelmed, and so I sort of went fetal for a little while. Which is a go-to defensive maneuver of mine that I bust out whenever I’m being steamrolled by reality.

           

And it was during this time I was fetal and relatively out of commission from blogging that I learned what had happened at Trinity College just ONE day after we had left the college for Galway (though I didn’t hear about it until I was back in the states.) I was so excited by the news that I wanted to write about it right then and there. But since I am slow, I didn’t write about it then. So I am writing about it now.  But that’s okay. Because, you want to talk about slow? This historic event has been 60 years in the making! Which means in geologic terms,  I was basically at Trinity when this happened. I still get a little thrill when to think I was very nearly in the presence of such a monumental and significant event. An event, I would like to point out,  that is so monumental and significant for no other reason except it IS so slow to happen. So what was this big deal historical moment?

A drop of pitch was finally caught falling on camera.

I kid you not. Since 1944, Trinity College in Dublin has kept tar (also called pitch) in a funnel to watch it flow. But it has such high viscosity a drop breaks free only once every decade or so.  Scientists have been trying to see that moment either in person or on camera since the beginning of the experiment, and have so far never managed to.  Because think about it: This drop takes ten to thirteen years to form and just one tenth of a second to fall. Sneezes take longer than that. 

 There are websites devoted to watching the pitch fall and people were thrilled, thrilled thrilled that they finally saw it fall. Why do scientists and tar-drop enthusiasts care so much about this moment? Maybe because that’s what humans like to do. We spend our lives trying to save ephemera, trying to capture and bottle the moments of change that happen in a flash. We like riddles and paradoxes and mysteries and a liquid that is 2 million times more viscous than honey and seems as solid as a rock for ten years until one day it doesn’t invites the sort of head scratching philosophical questions about essence and identity that has engaged us with our world since we were grunts in dark caves wondering who we were, why we smelled so bad (and who this sweet young thing beside us is.) 

In the end, it’s just a drop of tar. But it is the first drop of tar to fall on record. Sixty years after people first started trying to witness that moment.  Without such a buildup of anticipation, maybe nobody would care if a drop of tar fell or not. I like to read into that idea and wonder if maybe slowness makes its own form of greatness. Maybe that means there’s hope for me yet. 

references:

Trinity College School of Physics Website

"Nature" (18 July, 2013)