The Speed of Life

Greetings,

I felt strongly this morning to share my views with you all on the speed of life and what we can do control how fast our lives go.

Often our lives are hurried for no particular reason, from completion of one task then straight onto another. The hurry of our lives doesn’t just apply to our work life, it also applies to outside of work. On your way to school or work this morning you took the quickest route, why is that? Did you take your time to appreciate your surroundings and thank God for your blessings? When doing your shopping why did you stand in the shortest queue? Many of us fall into the trap of not slowing down and taking a break, during this extra time we could reflect or even better say a short prayer. After asking CEO of McLaren Zak Brown about how he has time for reflection given his immensely busy schedule he said ”Reflection time is always factored in, no matter how busy we are, how else do you expect to improve?” If the CEO of one of the most successful companies in the automobile industry slows down his life so he has time to reflect, I'm pretty sure that is a huge sign for everyone including myself who desires to be successful to slow our lives down.

The Ruthless elimination of hurry. This is a great book that I have recently completed which shows numerous methods to remove hurry from your lives. This can be done using numerous methods such as the gamification of day to day tasks. This ultimately increases your awareness and forces you to not fall into the robotic cycle of completing task after task. As we are currently undergoing the third industrial revolution we see the increase of mundane laborious tasks being completed by some sort of technology whether that's a coding program to sort through information or a robot organising documents ( Side-note: The first robot in human facial expressions has just been revealed and honestly it's pretty awesome!) My main point from all of this is: what are you doing to distinguish yourself from a robot? If everyday you are stuck in the same cycle and you are never improving yourself, then sorry to break it to you but you are no different from artificial intelligence. Hurry is like a virus, not recognised by ourselves but slowly spreads and increases until it's taken over so much that we can't deal with it. The way to stop this virus is by recognising the early signs: Being easily annoyed/ agitated, multitasking( only God is omnipresent, humans can only switch between tasks) and Fast-paced walking. Many of us walk at such a fast pace when there is even no end goal or target, just by simply walking slowly you manually slow your whole life down and temporarily remove that hurry from your life.

Finally I’d like to leave you all with this task to complete: As you enter this week with whatever tasks you may be completing, remember to slow down.

Good luck on your journey of eliminating hurry,

Esmond Afraine