Make Haste Slowly

Yes, these are my sandaled feet on the threshold of the outdoor Labyrinth at the Mandala Center on a beautiful, moderately chilly day in New Mexico over a year ago. I'd walked Labyrinths many times before, but the walk this day, I realized, could take place without the pressure of any meetings or deadlines whatsoever. And with that realization came an idea: why not walk each circuit by taking a mental journey through each year in my life? I decided I would pace myself according to the flow of memories, making my way around the next turn only when I had remembered everything I could from that year. The year I was born, 1963, went by rather quickly: other than recollections of some old sepia prints of our home, what I remembered was what was going on in the wider world: the assassination of JFK, Viet Nam, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and lest we forget, the introduction of the VW Bus.

Yet as year led to year and circuit to circuit, I had to slow down my pace. The more I remembered, the more slowly I walked. The more slowly I walked, the more I remembered. And I remembered things, and people, I'd long since forgotten. By the time I'd completed the walk, over an hour had gone by utterly lost in contemplation and I was deeply moved by the recognition that my life, like most, is an ever-widening web of grace-filled connections, relationships and encounters, a work forever in progress.

I look at this photo now and then as a reminder that if I truly want to go deeper in anything: relationship, thought, prayer or understanding...I need pull back on the reins and slow down my own galloping life. It's a logical axiom: the slower I go, the deeper I go. Of course, who has the luxury of slowing down much these days? Still, even the brief moments are of great value to the soul.

There is a saying woodburned into a plaque at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico: Festina Lente. Or, in English: Make Haste Slowly - a little bit of monastic humor that somehow makes more sense to me with each year that passes. If life is, in fact, more like a series of circles around a sacred center than a linear vector, what's the real advantage of all this rushing anyway? If our paths all lead to the same center anyway, why sprint to get there? Why not savor the journey?