Speed is life for those born Type-A. They walk fast, eat fast, often think faster than they speak, and pretty much do everything fast. Comes with it is impatience, wanting to do things quick and now. Speed thus becomes a way of life, expanding into a deep sense of liking for performance driving, surfing, the exhilarating speed of a wave, to stay afloat, to flow with it, the balance, to jump back to paddle as the wave loses its speed.

Speed helps achieve. And achieve faster. Mind never walks or even jogs. It just runs, often sprints. It is competitive. A constant state of competing.

Somewhere along the way, the effortlessness of being in a hurry, makes one realize the efforts needed to slow down. On many aspects of life, it just being slow that works. There begins it. The effort to slow down. Eventually to begin experiencing the beauty of being slow. For some that comes in their 40s. But, better late than never.

Monsoon has it all. The speed of torrential rains has it as it pours down the slanting tiled roofs of Kerala homes. The speed of falling water, the rains. Slowly the fury stops, it becomes a drizzle, a dribble, to a drop and then a droplet that slowly flows down the edges of the roof-tiles into the courtyard. And let’s you sleep calmly on a Monsoon night. Comes with it used to be the peace having done the home-work well. That slowness is beautiful. The first experience of the beauty of slowness as a child growing up with Monsoon rains.

Slowness of sipping tea, it’s expanded sense of time making evaporate the madness of life between calls, texts, emails and social media. That was an earlier blog topic to talk more about it at another time, over a bowl of ‘matcha’.

While walking the Stanford trail few months ago with a group of friends, I started pacing forward, as usual. Almost to the speed of a jog. Usha, good friend, said ‘enjoy the walk, we are not competing here’. So true. A reminder to the beauty of being slow. Such friends too happen. As I realize friendship is not a function of time, it is a meeting.

Earliest memories of slowness of music were from listening to kṣīrasāgara śayana! nannu cintala beṭṭavalēna rāma.. the Carnatic classical in ‘devagandhari’ raga’, ‘aadi’ taal, as KJ Yesudas sings in his evergreen voice, it brings with it the slowness of sea waves of a calmer sea letting its waves have milder embraces of the shore. kṣīrasāgara śayana – in the milky ocean you languidly repose, are you disinterested in your bard in distress? And another one with its slowness matching the elegant gait of an elephant.. “sAmaja vara gamana sAdhu hrut” in raga ‘Hindolam’.. Slowness of the raga training you to listen to the soulfulness of music that is spiritually uplifting. Comes with it is the emotional lightness. Towards an unbearable lightness of being!

Slowness is not stillness. It is a process towards it. But it has several nodes of stillness. Disjointed dots of stillness between the fury of water, the suddenness of a massive wave, a downpour washing away the slowness of that drizzle, the descending scale of notes in a raga, the avarohana. That’s the confluence of speed and its decelerating opposite of slowness. The beauty of both or more of the slowness. What’s more beautiful probably depends on the contrast it offers. For a TypeA it is always slowness, the beauty of being slow.