Speed

Our generation has been living by the pattern “the quicker, the better” ever since we were born. The earlier you start reading, the earlier you can begin learning to write or move on to whatever comes next. The earlier you go to school, the earlier you finish it. The more countries you visit by the age of 30, the more travelled you are.

It becomes a constant chase for “more” in a shorter period of time. The quicker you do things, the more you can have — and the better it seems. Somewhere along the way, we began to measure good things by quantity. It is measurable, easily understandable — so why not use it everywhere, to make life simple and familiar? And people do.

Speed is often the tool that allows us to reach that quantity. We want to see more, read more, gain more qualifications — the list is endless, or rather, it keeps growing.

I’ve noticed a trend of summing up the year: what have you done, what have you achieved. It made me wonder what happens when you start counting the number of books you’ve read and make it your goal.

I find that I need to stop reading every now and then, because my “perceptional sponge” becomes full. I need time to absorb images, feelings, and concepts from a book, to relate them to my own picture of the world before I can move on. I need to read less to understand more — to give myself that time and space. The same applies to travelling.

In everyday life, trends change faster and faster. We are told that if we don’t keep up — with AI, marketing, and countless other things — we will be left behind. There is a constant sense of being rushed, and the speed keeps increasing.

But there is a limit to how fast a person can move.

In one of the books I recently read, the main character — a highly successful person in early 20th-century London — takes a year-long break after an operation, then returns to the same position and continues working.

It is difficult to imagine such a situation in our world today, just 100 years later. Our life train moves at such speed, with so many changes, that we begin to feel we might not be able to step back onto it once we leave. And perhaps we wouldn’t — if we remain only in this measurable, countable dimension.

But what if there is another dimension?

One based on feeling — where life is not measured by numbers, but by what we have actually experienced along the way.

Counting then becomes a limitation.

But that, too, would be an extreme. Most of us cannot ignore the measurable world entirely.

What we can do is soften it — by allowing moments of slowing down, or even stillness.

Because the image you carry inside, when you close your eyes and smell flowers,
can be richer
than the one you see from the window of a bullet train.