Slowing Down to Speed Up

Getting outta Nowhereville

I’ve been feeling like I’m racing in first gear lately.

For weeks, no matter how much time I spend behind the wheel… no matter how much I try to floor it… I can’t seem to get out of the same dusty nowhere town somewhere out on Route 66.

Nowhereville. Let’s call it that.

Nowhereville is the worst of waypoints. It’s some distance from where you started but nowhere close to where you’re trying to go. Instead of feeling like you’ve covered some ground, all you see is how far you have left; and once you have somehow winded up right back in Nowhereville after a day of hard driving, what you have left starts to feel endless. Worse, every time you somehow loop around and pull right back into town, it feels like you’ve wasted time.

Nowhereville is the place where you feel bad about the miles behind you and hopeless about the ones ahead.

I hate this damn town.

My little stranding here is at least somewhat of my own making. Not entirely. But not entirely not either. I can’t change the one’s that are out of my control, so I’m not going to bore you with them. Instead, I’m just gonna focus on the parts that are my fault or within my power.

Mismanaging the Fuel Tank

Energy is fuel. Gasoline.

We get one tank a day. How full it is to start ain’t always up to us; but how we use it, well, that we can at least influence.

Just like with cars, we control our speed. How much do we race around? How quickly do we try to get things done? How quickly to jump to the next?

No matter what speed we choose, we only have that one tank of fuel; and that’s where the choice becomes important.

When you have only one tank of gas, you can either go fast or go far. Rev the engine; burn the fuel faster. You’ll get somewhere faster… however, you’ll run out of gas sooner. Drive the speed limit, you’ll cover ground more slowly but will cover more of it. There ain’t no option to get the benefit of both going slow and going fast at the same time.

I’ve been stubbornly resisting accepting that.

The reason for that…

Get stuck on the ‘E’ in ETA, Get Stuck on ‘E’ Altogether

Like most people, I wake up each morning with at least some semblance of what lays ahead for the day. My days tend to have a lot of moving parts; but nonetheless, I generally enter the day with at least a mental list of some of the key things I want to get done. Endpoints. Destinations.

That’s where the trouble starts.

It’s all well and good to want to get to Cheyenne by dark but if it’s a 12-hour drive and you catch a 4-hour detour, ya ain’t getting there when ya thought.

You ‘TA’ ain’t gonna be the one you ‘E’d’.

Your Time of Arrival ain’t gonna be the one you estimated.

Now, if I were an adult capable of incorporating learnings about recurrent obstacles so as to meaningfully adjust and therefore save myself from repeatedly being impaired by them, I would just go right ahead and learn to accept that the initial ‘E’ does not matter one damn bit.

I, however, am not yet that kind of adult. Instead, I stubbornly and somewhat masochistically lock in on my initial estimated time for when I’ll have something finished… and then I mentally whip my own ass like I’m a one man Paul Revere with only an hour to save the colonies.

It’s stupid. It’s bad. And it is entirely useless.

No matter what has happened thus far on any drive, there is a realistic ‘how much more time will it take?’ and there is an irrelevant ‘when did I think I’d get there?’

The latter – the ETA I hoped for originally - ain’t nothing but a whip… and I’ve mistaken it for the kind a jockey uses. Whip harder, go faster. That ain’t how it really works. There is a rapidly diminishing return from using the whip. After the first flick, it’s just punishment not urging.

So, I really need to get out of the self-flagellation of worrying about the original ETA and instead learn to love the RTD. Remaining Time to Destination. Let go of the expectation; embrace the present reality.

Granted, I may be entirely incapable of that but the present alternative is pretty much shit. All it does is leave me feeling harried, impossibly short on time, and perpetually late. Worse still, it makes even arriving entirely unsatisfying.

“I was supposed to be here earlier.” feels shitty. “Cool, I got here.” Probably wouldn’t.

And the shitty version has been a constant refrain lately. CONSTANT.

“I finished this, sure; but I’m late and behind and there isn’t enough time; and therefore EVERYTHING is going to be late until I catch up - and I will never catch up.”

That has been my dis-mantra… and it has led to an equally ineffective resting state.

When I have been ‘out of the car’ so to speak, instead of enjoying the break in Nowhereville, I’ve spent the time thinking about how impossibly far there is left to go.

That don’t help.

All that does is hijack your rest stop and ensure you are tired for the next leg.

Oh, how I have been tired... Physically tired; but first, mentally tired. The kind of tired you feel after having revved high through your entire tank. Lots of RPMs. Not a lot of ground covered. Mentally fatigued.

Writing is a lot more mentally taxing than I would have thought. I’ve come to learn that. But it is also fulfilling. It draws down some fuel… but then it adds some back.

The ‘staring down the highway’ just draws down… and for no gain whatsoever.

It would be one thing if I was using those mental RPMs to plan the travel ahead…

…which brings me to the next of my many recent driving errors:

Shortcutting planning the route in the interest of saving the time it would take.

That’s a fairly asinine approach.

Skipping the clearheaded thinking about what I’m going to do is the most fruitless of attempted cheats. It not only doesn’t speed up the time to destination; it often slows it down. And even when it doesn’t, it absolutely results in a RIDICULOUSLY WRONG initial ETA.

However long I think something I haven’t really planned out will take, it takes double that. Or triple. Or longer. I am a horrible under-estimator of how long things take. That is partially an ADHD thing. I’m not alone in that. Regardless, it is true of me. And it fucks up whole drives before my tires have even left the gravel in Nowhereville.

I’ll give you an example… I have been wanting to do something with the whole weekly One Good Thing tradition I do over on Twitter. I want to write something about it. I want to expand on the idea a little somehow. Make some merch. I know what I have in mind. I know how to do everything involved well. And I can build ‘communications plans’ for little projects like that one practically in my sleep. None of it would be remotely hard. It would just take time. And the first hours should be spent solely on planning it out.

However, trapped in my little doom loop of staring first at the ETA and then down the highway until I feel like I have no time for things that have to be planned, the idea has come no closer to hatching than when it was first laid.

I have seriously felt like “OH MY GOD, I CANT STOP TO THINK RIGHT NOW. I AM SO BEHIND AND IT’S GETTING DARK AND I HATE NOWHEREVILLE AND… WAIT…  GOD… NO… DOES THAT SIGN SAY ‘NOWHEREVILLE AHEAD’?”

Planning time, for me, pays a double dividend. It makes the travel easier and gets me farther and it’s a bit meditative all on its own. Sitting and quietly thinking is like pulling off into a rest stop and sitting at a shady picnic table for a while. It’s a break from driving.

So, I need to get back to making time for it.

I’ve gotten so out of balance lately. Instead of my life being like a cross country trip which has the work of driving but also the enjoyment of places visited along the way; I’ve just had an endless loop of revving high, getting only so far; and then laboring under how much farther I was ‘supposed to go’ and have left to go.

Sometimes, you have to slow down to speed up.

I’m gonna try to do that.

Plan the driving more.

Abandon the fiction of ‘multitasking’.

Focus on one leg at a time.

Take time out of the car and enjoy it.

On that note, I’m going to hit ‘post’ and then go spend a couple hours doing nothing productive at all. It’s a beautiful Saturday in Nowhereville. I’m gonna go look around.

[p.s. if ya want any of my corny little self-talk slogans here, help yourself. They’re sized for social media.]