Not long after I began a conversation with Bob Banner about slowing down, the brakes on my car went spongy.

I took the car to Nelson’s Garage in Cayucos, dreading the worst. What the hell was I going to do without a car? How was I going to get to work?

The brake system needs a new master cylinder and, guess what, I can’t afford it.

So, I’ve reduced my driving to a minimum and I’ve been forced to think about slowing down.

The pace of life in American culture has gone off the charts. We’re always on the go, rushing from our homes to our workplaces, distracted and disgruntled, guzzling coffee and gas, inhaling our food on the run or at power lunches, seldom taking a moment for ourselves.

It’s a sickening and insane way to live. The toll it has taken on our lives has been well documented.

Yet, we continue to beat ourselves, punishing our bodies and psyches, destroying our health, our families and our relationships with impossible schedules in the push to get ahead, or simply to stay afloat.

Stress-related illnesses continue to rise along with health care costs and untold damage to businesses from lowered production and hours lost from burnout.

Nearly 40 percent of Americans work more than 50 hours a week, according to the National Sleep Foundation, and about 26 percent of workers in the United States don’t take any time for vacation.

We’re the only industrial nation in the world that doesn’t require by law minimum paid leave. Most of Europe, meanwhile, offers its workers four to six weeks of paid time off every year.

We do it because work allows us to buy the things we think we need to maintain “quality of life.” But even quality of life has become a lesser reality to the more basic fact of survival.

In SLO County, for example, I run into people every day who work two or three jobs just to pay rent and barely make ends meet.

Once, people used to work extra hours because they wanted to acquire property or purchase something of great importance to them.

Not any more.

It’s not uncommon to hear people boast, or complain, of working 12-hour days throughout most of the year with little or no vacation time because they have to. That’s just the way life is, they say.

We call it, “making a living.” But what it’s doing, really, is making us sick.

At some point, our body’s going to say, “That’s it; I’ve had enough,” and shut down.

We’re either dead or near death with exhaustion.

That’s life in America.

We work ourselves silly until our bodies refuse to go along any more.

After a harrowing, year-long run as managing editor, I needed to take a break from New Times. I had burned out.

I asked for a week, recuperated as best I could and, when it was time to return to work, I couldn’t do it.

I barely had enough time to catch my breath, let alone get my wits back and feel rejuvenated. I had fried all my reserves. On Monday, when I was supposed to return, I just wanted to run away and hide.

I thought of a better idea: I’ll ask for another week off.

I marched straight into the publisher’s office that Monday and asked for one more week.

“I’m not ready to come back yet,” I said. “I need more time to recover.”

The publisher just stared at me. Maybe “recover” was the wrong word, but it was the truth. I felt as though I had committed a sacrilege, asking for more time off.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had two weeks off straight. Still, the boss continued to stare at me as though I had weakened, as though I’d gone off the deep end, or lost my way.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What is it? You don’t think I should take another week off?”

Finally, in his magisterial way, he said: “I’m not questioning whether you should take another week off. I’m questioning your ability to do this job.”

Well, he was right about that. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to do it. The hours were long, the pay was paltry and the rewards were mostly personal, not to mention the hugely unfair division of wealth in the company so typical in most American businesses.

And I was dead tired from working hard.

So, I took another week off. Finally, after some real rest and relaxation, I returned to work, only to be fired.

It can be argued that I wasn’t really qualified for the job, that I didn’t do it very well. But the message was clear: Don’t ever take time off if you want to keep your job.

The sad fact of American life is that it revolves mostly around work. It consumes the better part of our lives, and is largely the cause for our feeling rushed and overwhelmed.

We reserve little time for celebration or community because we’re too damned busy with our jobs.

And most of us don’t even like our jobs. Ask anyone whether they’d rather be working or relaxing at home or on vacation and few would say they’d rather be at the office.

Our workdays cut increasingly into our schedules until we have little time left over for our health, our hobbies and our loved ones. What little time remains seems to be nothing more than a mad shuffle between appointments, meetings, and shopping.

Various reasons have been offered for this imbalance, from rising costs of basic necessities to over-consumption of unnecessary goods. Whatever the cause, we have to slow down and get our lives back.

I don’t exactly know what the solutions are, but I do know that life itself inheres a sensible rhythm, which we seem to have forgotten. Observing simple life processes as basic as breathing can move us in the right direction.

Meditation, or simply observing the huge expanse of sea and sky, can inform us of life rhythms that are much larger and often slower than the artificial rhythms of the clock to which we daily subject ourselves at work. At the very least, they will help us to understand what’s most important in life.

I’ve learned from the garden, for example, that life moves at its own pace. We can’t speed things up with our own clocks. We can’t push at life with our demanding schedules and expect it to move at the speed we’d like it to go. I can’t force seedlings to grow into flowering plants as quickly as I might like. They require patience and attention. I’ve learned to wait, and to appreciate a different rhythm, a different pace.

The garden has taught me the ridiculousness of rushing, of always being on the run, of feeling flushed with anxiety.
Rushing is dangerous. It goes against nature to rush, unless danger compels it.

Life-threatening dangers compel action. But the sort of rushing to action we see in modern life, and especially on the job, seldom seems compelled by any real danger, only imagined ones.

Our bodies and our minds need time for rest and play (or exercise), as well as work. If we don’t honor these, we will suffer for it as is already apparent from the endless prescriptions for pain relievers and antidepressants.

At least half the people I meet are taking prescription drugs for stress-related ailments. Popping more pills isn’t going to solve the problem of overwork and over-consumption.

Slowing down will. Taking more time off, working fewer hours and reducing our expenses will help move us in the right direction. So will breathing fresh air, taking walks, relaxing with friends — all simple pleasures.

Books abound on how to simplify our lives. It used to be that we talked about “voluntary simplicity,” indicating we could choose a better way to live. All of the literature informs us of the beauty of a simple life.

Yet, what it doesn’t tell us is that simplicity, scaling back and slowing down, is no longer a choice.

Where once sculpting out a life of simplicity might have been voluntary, it’s now a necessity. We must find a way to cut costs, and quit the treadmill of trying to make ends meet.

The demands on our time, the endless hours at work, have made us ill and ill-tempered, and dependent on drugs to keep us going. To survive, we must consider a simpler life; we have to slow down.

I’m not exactly thrilled that my car is unsafe to drive, but it has forced me to go more slowly, and to drive less. I’m much too habituated to the “necessity” of having a car to give it up entirely — at least for now.

But it has allowed me to think more clearly about what’s really necessary in this insanely fast-paced culture of ours, and it isn’t more time at the office. Neither is it buying more things for myself, although I’ll be glad when I can finally afford to get my brakes fixed.

Stacey Warde is a regular contributor to HopeDance. He also freelances, gardens, landscapes and washes windows so he can possibly take that needed vacation. He can be reached at swarde805@charter.net.

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