slow

"What I do not have is kakakaka, the Kikongo work for hurrying up. But I find I can go a long way without kakakaka. Already I have gone as fas as the pools and the log bridge on the north. And south, to clearings where women wearing babies in slings stoop together with digging sticks and sing songs (not hymns) and grow their manioc. Everyone knows those places. But without kakakaka I discover sights of my own..." -Adah (Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible)

I move so slowly these days. It takes very little exertion to wear me out, mind and body. Even the process of getting all my stuff unpacked and organized (in my head, I keep calling it "assimilation and accomodation" like the psychology nerd that I apparently still am) is moving very slowly. I wonder if I can be like Adah and allow this slowness to come to some good somehow. A member of my church was talking to me after the service the other day, and he said that maybe all this is happening to me because I just needed to slow down. "You'd been going going going for years," he said, "and maybe God knew you needed a break." Maybe so. Maybe all my "going going going," my kakakaka, was getting in the way of something that God was trying to communicate to me. Maybe I wasn't pausing enough to be still and know that God is God (Psalm 46:10). I guess that while I'm taking this hiatus from the real world, I will discover sights of my own. Maybe I already am. I guess there's plenty of time, because the process of getting healthy again is going to be, well, slow.

"Been a scratch on the surface
Been a clog in the drain
Been melodramatic
Been sleepin' for days
Been one in a million
Been a million to one
This is takin' forever
Always seems to return that
I'm slow..."

-Guster