We bought a new CD for our car. It’s by the Laurie Berkner Band and we discovered it after riding to the zoo with my sister in law.
There’s one particular song that took my breath away the first time I heard it and has been stuck in my head ever since. You may know it. It’s called “Fast and Slow.” If you don’t know it take a listen. Humor me. I don’t post videos too often and everything will make much better sense if you watch it.
I know I delve too deep sometimes, but I think it’s a beautiful song. It’s one of those songs I want to learn so I can sing it to Abigail before she goes to sleep. I want those words to swirl around her mind as she dreams.
Ryan and I have joked before about being on Abigail time and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before in some previous post. Yes, we are quite sure that when Abigail returns home from her first day of kindergarten she will also return with a mostly full lunchbox not yet understanding the concept of eating lunch in 20 minutes.
Abigail wants to do it her way, in her time, and there’s not a whole lot of convincing her otherwise. I lovingly refer to her as spuuuuuun-KY!
I’m fairly patient and I’m no “rabbit” but how many times have I said, “Hurry, Hurry!” “Go fast!” “Quick!” And while sometimes we do need to hurry, I know that most of the time when I say those things we aren’t in a rush at all — that playground is still going to be standing, the milk and string cheese will still be plentiful at the grocery store, the line at the post office will still be ridiculous.
So why do we do it? All of this rushing and flying about. What’s the first thing people tell you when you have a swollen belly full with a growing baby?
Enjoy it. It goes by in a blink.
Or when a grandmother-type stops to ask about your toddler whose legs are dangling out of the front of the shopping cart and whose cheeks are carrying crumbs from the free cookie.
They grow up so fast.
These people are right.
And maybe it’s just me, but I know that the “rabbit” and “turtle” are just decoys. That turtle singing, telling us to “slow down and wait for me,” warning us that “you may find yourself missing the world you go past” that may not be a turtle at all but instead the inner voice of a child.
It’s hard to be patient when my to do list and Abigail’s don’t match up. The walk back from the middle of the apple orchard is long when she wants to try to carry the load herself. A bike ride around the neighborhood is slow when every ant, branch, stick, and rock needs to be examined. But instead of thinking of these things as painstakingly long and excruciatingly slow maybe I need to think of them as perfectly long and wonderfully slow.
Join me?
“And other times we can go fast!”
On another note:
In the spirit of slowing down, you may have noticed my blog slowing down. After a lot of thinking and almost reconciling that it may be time to end this little space, my husband stopped me. That would be sad, he simply said. And I agree. I need this space, I want Abigail to have these words one day, and maybe in meantime it’s been fun or helpful for some of the people who share it with us.
But there is this other part of me that acknowledges that my time is limited and there is some other writing I’d like to work on outside of here. So I’m going to be working on finding that balance between blogging about our real life and trying my hand at a different kind of storytelling. I hope you’ll bear with me.
The Oregon Tail 