One morning I sat on the porch with a cup of tea and read slowly. Birds moved somewhere beyond the yard. Wind passed through the trees. The locusts were already loud. Nothing remarkable happened.
And yet, after a while, I had the strange sense that my mind had returned to me. There was enough. Enough time to finish the paragraph. Enough quiet to notice the air. Enough room for one thought to follow another without being displaced by the next thing asking for me. My heart seemed to hear itself again.
That experience stayed with me because so much of ordinary life now feels organized around the opposite assumption: There is not enough. Not enough time. Not enough attention. Not enough margin between one thing and the next.
Medicine makes this particularly easy to believe. There is always another patient, another result, another message, another unfinished note. We become skilled at carrying several things at once, and after a while that skill can begin to feel like virtue.
Real physician voices, twice a week
Free, and one click to unsubscribe.
I noticed what this had done to me one day when I heard some coworkers laughing down the hall. My first response was not delight. It was irritation. Don’t they realize how tight the day is? I heard laughter and translated it almost immediately into inefficiency. Lingering seemed wasteful. Joy seemed, if not irresponsible, at least poorly timed.
That recognition bothered me. The scarcity was no longer only in the schedule. It had entered my imagination.
Later, some coworkers stopped for a few minutes and began doing simple standing stretches together, moving side to side and laughing. I joined them. It could not have lasted very long. But something changed. My body loosened. My mind cleared. I laughed too. And when I went back to work, I was not further behind. I was more present.
That moment has become a small parable for me. I heard joy and judged it. Then I entered joy and was restored by it.
I used to think slowing down meant doing less. Now I wonder whether it means something more important: remaining available and interruptible. Available to the person in front of us. Interruptible by something we did not anticipate. A colleague at the doorway. A patient who needs one more minute. A question whose answer takes the conversation somewhere we had not planned. Laughter coming from down the hall.
Not every interruption is a distraction. Some are invitations back into the life we were moving too quickly to notice.
There are places in medicine where speed saves lives. Urgency can be exactly what reality requires. But urgency is a poor permanent posture. Carry it long enough and ordinary human presence can begin to feel like delay.
The patient becomes the visit. The colleague becomes the interruption. Silence becomes empty space. Rest becomes time we should have used better. And eventually we can become very efficient at moving through experiences we were meant to inhabit.
This is not an argument against efficiency. Patients should not wait unnecessarily. Clinicians should not spend their evenings doing work that a functioning system could have helped them finish during the day. But efficiency is a tool. It should not become a way of seeing.
A day claimed down to the minute leaves very little of us unclaimed. There is less room for the unexpected, less room to linger, less room for something, or someone, to change our course. Perhaps that is one of the quieter losses of life at speed.
Some things do not compete well for our attention. A hesitation before someone answers. The story that comes after we thought the visit was finished. A colleague who stops beside us. The joke in the hallway. The feeling in our own bodies that we have been moving for hours without actually arriving anywhere.
These things rarely announce themselves as important. They simply appear. And we have to be available enough to receive them.
I am not particularly good at this. I still hurry. I still fill empty spaces. I still sometimes hear an interruption before I hear the person making it. But I am beginning to notice the difference.
There are mornings when I can sit long enough for a page to become more than something I have read. There are moments at work when I can let the next thing wait. There are people whose presence reminds me that not everything valuable moves the work forward. Sometimes it moves us sideways. Into laughter. Into conversation. Into a moment we did not schedule and would not have chosen, but which somehow returns us to ourselves.
The world does not always shout what matters. Sometimes it interrupts. And perhaps part of becoming slower is learning not to hurry past it.
Sherry M. Adkins is a family physician.
