The Pace of Life

With limited costume options available, Syntia decided to dress up as Snow White for Halloween. She was quite chuffed with her princess dress and it made her curious about who Snow White was exactly, so she watched the movie with me for the first time. What a refreshing experience!! The pace of this movie is soooo sloooow. All in all not that much happens over the course of the story, but a lot of time is taken out to show the detail of each part. For instance, a whole scene is dedicated just to the cleaning of the dwarves' house.. 😳

I watch quite a lot of animations with Syntia and most of them move at a 'splishety-splash big-badda-boom' pace these days with lots of things happening at the same time. Let me post two links here as a matter of illustration, cause words are falling short here 😂.

Song from ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937):

Song from ‘Vivo’ (2021):

Anyway, it had me reflect on our current day and age and how much more we've aligned to the pace of consciousness vs the pace of the Physical. In thought we can 'travel' at hyperspeed, play out multiple scenarios in a fraction of a second, entertain wild fantasies and imaginations, whereas obviously in the Physical we can only move One moment and one breath at a time. Surely, much of that change is due to changes in technology that have enabled us to access, display and process so much more information at a much faster pace. And because we can, we do. But it seems to also have changed our 'baseline' of the speed at which we move internally. Where even in moments where we are 'resting' or 'not doing anything', we're still scrolling through a ton of information on a screen, or buzzing with thoughts and energy within.

It's a change that's also not that noticeable, a change that has crept in over time and exactly because it's our new baseline, it tends to go unnoticed. Except of course, when you watch a movie from a time when people were still rooted much more firmly in physical space and time and there's this resistance coming up within to actually slow down to the pace of the movie, lol.

It got me to reflect overall on our ability to be patient, our ability to honor the pace at which certain things move that we cannot rush or interfere with and it got me to reflect on my childhood versus my daughter’s. I had plenty of opportunity growing up to learn the value of patience, to stick with a project over time, and steadfastly move to the completion of it in the physical, even if it seems like it will take forever at the start, or gets boring halfway though. And that is quite a valuable skill, because as the saying goes, many things worth doing or creating, take an exceptional amount of time, consistency and dedication in the physical.

When the idea came up for Syntia and I to create a ‘days-of-the-week’ calendar to help her remember the names and the order of the days in the week, my first impulse was to go to my computer, open a word document and start sifting through fonts till we found one we both liked. But then I remembered my experience with the Snow White movie and the value of being able to pace ourselves. So, instead I decided to do it all by hand. At some point I had to really dig in my memories to remember how teachers used to create charts and posters for the classroom before they started printing them. And then I remembered how they would use guiding lines in pencil to help with clear writing, and how they would first write in pencil and then go over it with a marker or with paint.

Needless to say, it took a long time to complete, but interestingly, it made it also all the more enjoyable. Working with our hands, having to plan the steps and put in care, focus and dedication, it helped me connect with a part of myself that just loves being fully here and immersed in the task at hand, where that internal racing, that buzzing I mentioned earlier, just stops.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that videos of skilled workers go viral on TikTok as being ‘oh so satisfying’ to watch. It’s an aspect of life that we all too easily lose touch with these days, where it’s become harder to take pride in the things we contribute to, because so often we’re just a cog in a machine, removed from the physical process that goes into creating a finished product, we’re not using our hands, we’re not touching it, carving it, digging it, kneading it, whatever applies..

And I really don’t mean to sound like ‘everything was better in the good ol’ days’ – there’s plenty of technology that has a positive and constructive effect on human life. I do see though, that we need to actively balance it, actively build moments or seize opportunities to go the manual route, to pace ourselves, to create with our hands, because they are the gates and bridges to parts of ourselves and parts of life that we otherwise neglect, take for granted, and miss out on.

P.S. – To specify – I took the clip from the Vivo movie to illustrate this 1 dimension of the pace of movies then and now, but otherwise it’s a movie worth watching! It actually plays with the theme of ‘the old and the new (or the old and the bold)’ and how, rather than being mutually exclusive, they have much to offer each other and can complement each other beautifully 😉.