“If you’re having difficulty coming up with new ideas, then slow down. For me, slowing down has been a tremendous source of creativity. It has allowed me to open up — to know that there’s life under the earth and that I have to let it come through me in a new way. Creativity exists in the present moment. You can’t find it anywhere else.”

-Natalie Goldberg

“When did it happen?” asked my girlfriend, laughing and shaking her head as she sank into the nearby chair. “When did we get old?”

I flopped into the chair next to her, “I’m not sure, but in a strange way, it’s kind of nice.”

The crowds swelled and pushed around us while we sat.

And…it was good.

It seems that I have become the old auntie that sits on the bench now and again. A woman who spots a chair and sees it as a great opportunity to take a load off her pounding feet.

It’s not like I’ve now completely collapsed into a state of doing nothing. I still hang with a pretty active crowd. I walk. I cycle. I do my little gym routine. In short, I’m just one more statistic in the boomer marketing demographic that ‘enjoys an active lifestyle’.

But strangely, there is something else at work in all this. I secretly kind of like this proclivity for leisure. I feel like I’m more in tune with, and finally (could it be true?) actually listening to my body.

Because of this need for less speed, I feel more cat-like in my ability to lounge, to take the time to walk through the park instead of taking the direct route, to sit on a bench, to feel Vancouver’s autumnal fog wrap itself around the city in a muffled softness…to bear witness to the birds that flit through the rusty leaves and the golden grasses…to take the time to absorb all that is right in front of me.

Don’t look now, but every now and then I think might be getting the hang of this thing called life.