A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough by Wayne Muller

moment of shared presence, to offer us what they have found, what they have seen, something only shared when they feel held by our undistracted, unhurried time and attention.
    If we are kind and merciful, let us presume we are in fact trying to “catch up” to something more soothing, peaceful, and nourishing than this frantic, desperate, questing pursuit of everything. But what might that be? What are we trying so hard to get caught up to ?

The Speed of the Mind and Heart
    W hen we say we are trying to get “caught up” in our busy lives, what are trying to catch up to? And how does it seem to be working?
    In his book Time Shifting , Stephan Rechtschaffen makes a crucial distinction between what he calls mental time and emotional time. For our purposes, let’s call these mind time and heart time.
    Try this simple test: Allow your mind to conjure an image of an elephant; now a tree; now the Statue of Liberty; now your elementary school; now a Volkswagen beetle; now a grocery store; and finally, a television set. Are you having trouble keeping up with the test so far? Probably not. You clearly have a gifted imagination.
    Now try this: Allow yourself to feel overjoyed with happiness; now feel really furious and angry; now unbearably sad; now absolutely terrified; now perfectly safe; now passionately in love; now quiet, content, and at peace; finally, become thoroughly despondent and depressed.
    How are you doing? Finding it more difficult to keep up? Are you falling behind? Of course you are. Because the mind processes mental information at a much faster speed than the heart can ever process emotional information. The mindcan grasp images, data, forms, shapes, and patterns at an astonishing rate of speed. We notice this when, for those of us who recall, in the early days of the Internet, how unimaginably long it took for the first dial-up connections to load each Web page—sometimes as long as a minute or more for each page. And, if it turned out to be the wrong page—as it often was—then we had to start all over again, redial our connection, or reboot the computer. It seemed like it took forever.
    Most of us who use the Internet now have access to some kind of high-speed, broadband connection, and a Web page can load in a few seconds. And guess what? We still get frustrated, even angry that it takes so long! Because our minds can move and shift so swiftly, having to wait those extra seconds for what it wants immediately can feel, for the impatient mind, like an eternity.
    But our very human heart requires a great deal more time to process, understand, allow in the rich array of disparate feelings, emotions, spiritual events, however pleasant or deeply painful, however familiar or new. Every emotional state elicits in us a certain amount of confusion, denial, understanding, acceptance, and recognition. Some experiences, such as intense grief, can take years to fully digest. Love, friendship, trust, all these need time, and a great deal of it, before the heart can truly be able to know what it knows.
    Unfortunately for our hearts, our culture has designed our technologies to move at the speed of the mind. So our Internet, cell phones, text messages, push-to-talk, instant messaging, faster computer speeds, higher memory, all push us to move faster and faster. Meanwhile our poor, sluggish, inefficient heart—the tortoise in the world of the turbocharged hare—always seems toneed more and more—not less—time. In the midst of the frantic pace of a world hurtling by at light speed, the heart struggles to find some way to keep pace with what is, in fact, a completely impossible and foreign language.
    In other words, the heart is trying to “get caught up” to the speed of the mind.
    To relentlessly force the tender wisdom, thoughtful reflection, and perceptive honesty of the human heart to conform to the ridiculously impossible, inhuman speed of the world, to its ever-increasing mind-driven technologies, is to cause