Slow Down. Pause. Listen.

“Keep digging your well. Water is there somewhere.”
- Rumi


Slow Down. Pause. Listen.

By Alex Peavey

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness."

— Viktor Frankl

"If you want to heal, if you want to relieve the suffering of the people around you, just practice mindful listening. We call it compassionate listening: to listen in order to relieve people from their own suffering, and that is what we can do with the energy of mindfulness. But, before doing that, you must cultivate the energy of mindfulness. You do not listen with the aim of judging, criticizing, comparing. You listen just to relieve that person from suffering."

— Thich Nhat Hanh

I’ve found observationally from having cancer that everything has to slow down.  I’ve narrowed my work hours down...because otherwise, I literally can’t live. Slowing down personally has made me realize that our collective pace is unsustainable. 

Everyone seems to be moving fast all the time, which is not what we were meant to do. When we go-go-go constantly, what are we doing to ourselves? We injure ourselves daily by thinking and functioning at such a crazy pace. To make things worse, in trying to solve our problems, we do more and go even faster. 

I’ve adjusted my work schedule to fit my health needs, but I can easily slip into over-committing myself and getting caught up in the “fastness” again. It reminds me of a rip current at the beach...everything is beautiful and peaceful and you’re just swimming along when BOOM, you’re sucked out into the ocean. And a rip current is difficult to get out of. The best way to survive it is to ride with it and not fight it until you can go parallel with the coast and get back to shore. There are always rip currents around us, and we can get all caught in them...which is natural. When I find myself getting pulled out to sea, I have to remember to slow down and surrender to the flow until I am free from it. 

How do we combat the fastness of life? By observing all the opportunities to slow down, which are abundant around us. Having cancer has forced me to do that. 

Really, every single person is terminal. That’s not being morbid: it’s being honest. Whether you have terminal cancer or not, you’re going to die. And that can be a liberating truth. It helps us approach life like our lives matter. You don’t need to be in a terminal diagnosis to do this. 

For me, this truth goes to the heart of Viktor Frankl’s quote about finding the space between stimulus and response. Finding that pause can help us slow down in this rat race of a society and approach life like it really matters. This quote is the foundation from which most of my own mindfulness practice and teachings come regarding the application of mindfulness in real-life, spur-of-the-moment situations.

A lot of people are looking for things to slow down FOR. But the way I see it, step one is the Frankl quote, step two is the Thich Nhat Hanh quote. We slow down to take care of ourselves in order to listen compassionately and take care of others. That’s my road map. But how do you do it? 

To me, it’s a matter of listening, both literally and figuratively. I believe that listening is both a pathway and an outcome to the peace we seek for ourselves and others in this rat race. In mindfulness, we talk about listening to the body. But we can also practice listening through how we experience music.

When I listen to music, I like to listen to each instrument individually, then again to hear how all of the sounds come together. At no point am I waiting for the song to be over. I focus only on listening and appreciating each sound. I like trying to hear the spaces between the notes where there’s no sound at all. The silence between the beats.

Where we are as a society, there’s no silence between the beats. It’s just noise. The reason we’re so fast-paced is because we need to get it done, whatever “it” is. Finish college. Grad School. Get that project done. If music were that way, every song would be one beat long. 

How do we slow down when the world around us seems to dictate the pace? Stop for a moment, pretending that the sounds around you are instruments. What instruments do you hear? Is there silence in between the sounds? If you’re inundated with noise, try not to become overwhelmed by it, simply just hear it. Hear the noise so you can recognize the silence. 

In a nutshell, that’s how we can all slow down. Find the silence in the midst of the noise by listening, literally and figuratively. When you recognize those gaps, you can expand the spaces in between just as Frankl suggests. 

I’ve become my own metronome by paying attention to my breath. I pay attention to that little moment between when I breathe in and breathe out. That pause. Everything is suspended in that moment. It’s like being a kid on a swing, feeling the thrill of that pause after you go up right before you come back down. If I can focus on my own breath and my own heartbeat, I listen for the silence in between. It’s amazing what magic starts to unfold when I do this. 

Last night I was talking with a friend on the back porch, and in a quiet moment, an owl right behind us made its deep owl noises. My friend said it sounded like an Expo marker on a dry erase board. I will never hear an owl the same way, nor an Expo marker. It was a moment I won’t forget. Whether you’re sitting on your back porch hearing an owl or sitting in a meeting hearing an Expo marker wishing the meeting were over, listen for the reason you’re there. Appreciate what’s around you. The beauty in the moment is in the eyes - and ears - of the beholder. 

Everything that arises gives us a new opportunity to slow down, pause, and listen. Not as an analogy, but as a way of living every moment of our lives.

Alex Peavey has practiced Mindfulness since age 15, received professional training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction from Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli, and now works at Summit Emotional Health and with the VCU Men’s Basketball Team as a Mindfulness Consultant. Alex and his wife Sarah have two children, Bodhi and Jane. In March 2017, Alex was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, but with the help of his own mindfulness practice, a healthy lifestyle, and a team of amazing doctors, he continues to live life to the fullest and defy the odds every single day.