A Season for Slowing Down
I was out on a walk this morning and kept coming back to the thought that everything comes to us at the right time. Remember this, and you can be free — free of wondering, free of stressing, free of rushing, free of the weight and pressure of it all. My all-time favourite meditation echoes this sentiment, saying that, “by letting go, it all gets done.” This serves as a great reminder that there is beauty in the not knowing.
I’ve recently started hearing more and more about the concept of human design. My knowledge of the topic is still very limited, but from my understanding, it is a system that pulls from multiple existing systems (including I’Ching and Myers-Briggs) and classifies people into five “energy types” — manifestors, generators, projectors, reflectors, and manifesting generators. These types help explain how best to use our own energy to create more ease in our lives, in accordance with what is optimal for us.
Though I don’t believe that any one system can ever tell the full story — be it classifying based on Big 5 (OCEAN) personality type, Myers-Briggs type, or love language(s), etc. — I believe each finding can teach us something about ourselves and how we interact with others. Based on what I’ve learned about human design so far, it seems that projectors (my energy type) are people who “have the gift of seeing things in a way that others can’t,” value efficiency, and are here to help guide others.
As much as I can be quite Type A in many aspects of my life, in many other ways I’m a last-minute type of person, which may surprise some people. I do well with leaving things down to the wire, telling myself (wrongly?) that I function best when I’m under pressure. This is simply everyone’s excuse for procrastination though, isn’t it? — the claim that we “do well under pressure”?
I rarely have difficulty summoning the energy to produce under pressured circumstances — a projector is said to easily take on the energy of others, which helps to explain the high baseline of energy that I feel lives within me. This energy source isn’t endless, however. A projector’s “battery may be smaller, but it’s more efficient” — this means that, while I can produce very efficiently under pressure, my effort typically comes in the form of bursts. As a result, where I sometimes struggle is with keeping up — I may lose steam or interest earlier than others, since a projector is not “built to just output all day long, [they] are built to spend most of [their] time observing, learning, processing, refining”. This also means that more time is needed for me to charge-up again, which perhaps also helps to explain my inclination towards enjoying time on my own so much. I recognize that it is important to protect my energy, as it is a limited resource.
This piece of writing was not at all what I expected and truthfully, I am pulling the plug on what feels like the half-way point to me because I lost steam, after expending all the energy I had in the tank. I could keep pushing myself to produce more material and then clean it up and perfect it, but it’s just not in me and I have to learn to honour that. In a world that pushes for and rewards a fast pace of living and doing and working and producing, it can be such a luxury to slow down. There exists a disconnect that doing = producing, and that if we’re not producing anything (or not producing enough), we’re not doing anything (or doing enough). But not everything has to be quantified — not everything needs to have an associated output.
Maybe this fast pace is causing us all to create “chaos” in our lives, where it’s not needed. I’ve long recognized in myself a desire to go-go-go and also a struggle to slow down. But what slowing down gives us is more time and more space — the finest of resources. More time and space to sleep in and sleep more, to go about our day at a slower pace, to pour back into ourselves, to have better awareness of our own limits and set boundaries accordingly, to actively choose not to overexert ourselves.
This is dedicated to a dear friend of mine, who gave me a kind, but firm nudge (hi, B lol) and challenged me to put out a new piece of writing today. While there was a ton of struggle and I felt wildly outside of my comfort zone, it provided me a real-life example of exactly what I was writing about — my bursts of energy allowed me to produce under pressure, but as time went on, I sensed myself losing steam. I gained a deeper understanding of the capacity of my own energy levels. Writing this also confirmed that while I do in fact thrive in an environment that values efficiency (I finished it, after all!), I also recognize that when you choose to favour efficiencies, some corners will naturally get cut. Maybe this piece of writing will feel incomplete, maybe it will read as scattered, maybe there are typos I have glossed over — this serves as a reminder that while efficiency may get the job done, it isn’t always for the best.
The irony is that this was supposed to be a piece about slowing down, when the reality of completing this was quite the opposite. I learned that, while I work well under pressure and can get the job done, I don’t create well under pressure — this is an important distinction that I hadn’t thought of before. I think this is the lesson I needed to learn today. As I said at the very beginning, everything comes to us at the right time.