Festina lente

Festina lente. Make haste, slowly. This delicious oxymoron is my oft-summoned motto these days. I am not sure if it is because I am a scientist who embraces the fact that electrons can be in two places at once or am just unusually open to cognitive dissonance, but I revel in bringing together contrary viewpoints. An equilibrium surely exists somewhere in the middle. When I was a rising high school senior at a summer program at St. Paul's School, I lived in a dorm called Middle. Everyone designed t-shirts for their dorm and ours had a picture of an Oreo cookie on the back, with the inscription "Middle is the best part." Though the relative merit of Oreo cream filling is arguable, I tend to think the value of the Golden Mean (the middle way) is well borne out. I am compelled to point out that moderation must be moderated as well -- the irony is too perfect to ignore.

I keep Festina lente close, only because it is unnervingly easy to run around like a wild person, grasping to fit twenty different things into a single day, to satisfy ambition or evade fear. I try to embrace this maxim because it seems undeniable that our rushed (digital) lifestyles are cultivating short attention spans that prevent us from truly experiencing, thinking, or creating. How we spend our days is certainly a far cry from our ancestors even five generations back, not to mention 100. I worry about losing the ability to deeply pay attention. In fact, with eighteen tabs open on my chrome at the moment, I am beset with distractions on all fronts. We need time to think, to spend time on one task for an uninterrupted stretch, preferably hours at a time. It almost seems that, to avoid getting caught up in the race of inattention, one needs to have an unhealthy obsession with the thing that is most important to you--to be able to make any progress at all and avoid the many-faced sirens of our modern world. Sometimes, rarely, I achieve the middle way between fast and slow. It's lovely there.

Pond near Newton Hill, Littleton MA