Confessions of a Speed Demon

On finding presence and slowing down time

The turtles are all out today, starved for sun like the rest of us. Basking on logs, baking in the gravel on backroads with their leathery heads extended like tongues, eyes closed in repose.

Their existence isn’t symbolic—they’re more dinosaur than metaphor—but still, I can’t help feeling like turtle after turtle after turtle is telling me something. As I speed-walk my way around the pond, as I take a turn too fast on Highland Road and nearly flatten a serving-platter-sized snapper, I get the message. Slow the f*** down.

I’ve always had a sort of accelerated energy inside me. An impatience, a restlessness, pacing from one activity to the next. A need to get things done, swiftly, efficiently, and well. In Ayurveda, they call it an excess of vata energy. I feel like a pot about to boil over, all of the time, I recently told my therapist.

In first grade, Mrs. Johnson called me Speed Demon for the way I’d quickly hand in my work. Even then, I understood it wasn’t entirely a compliment. How my speed revealed a great hunger to accomplish something, to prove that I could do it, without really learning the lesson at all.

Time has only gotten more compressed as I recently took on a part-time job at a local arts center called PS21 (a beautiful space that hosted the See You At The Maypole album release show last fall)—this, in addition to the unpaid part-time labor of childcare and caring for a parent and making art. I’m in charge of the community programming, which is a dream job, which is exactly what I want to be doing in tandem with my own creative practice. The work feels important in light of the many political and ecological threats to our communities.

But now, any crevices in my days have gotten paved over. Life is an Autobahn that I’m flying down, flooring it.

Forty-five minutes before daycare pick-up, I force myself to shut my laptop and head to my favorite nature preserve. It’s a textbook late-spring day, with a freshness and clarity to the air that suffuses every cell with green. Even though I still have so much more work to do, I know I need a mental reset, to take a deep breath and slather some sun on my skin.

Time doesn’t just open up, I told my songwriting students during our class earlier in the day. There will always be reasons not to write, always more emails or errands to encroach on that precious time. You can’t wait around for the space to present itself; you have to commandeer the space, and then protect it at all costs.

This is how I feel taking charge of this small parcel of time to walk in nature: like I am battling against the scaffolding of daily life, like the tiny bright anti-capitalist spirit inside me is screaming at me to reconsider what constitutes a day well spent. As I walk past them, the turtles drop off the log into the pond, one by one, leaving behind a beacon of driftwood, bright with sun.

And still—and yet—I can’t help checking my watch as I loop the trail. Still find myself composing messages in my head and reaching for my phone, hot in my pocket. I start naming the wildflowers I see in an effort to ground myself in the present: clover, clover, bedstraw, bird vetch, clover. But it’s not long before my mind is galloping off again, far above the flowers. I hear Mrs. Johnson calling me Speed Demon and feel that bit of shame prick at my ears again.

If the land can’t command me into presence, I think, then I’m doomed.

This isn’t how I want to live. This rapidity, this racing against an invisible opponent, which is of course time itself, always too meager. I dip into it again and again, like scraping a soup bowl with a slotted spoon, so that it never reaches my mouth, and I am never full, and there is never enough.

But then I remember:

I have one more weapon to wield against the churn. One more trick to force myself to take the foot off the gas. It’s as easy as breathing, a feeling as fresh and green as the air. I start to sing.

Time instantly slows.

Lazy, lizard-like, reptilian time.

Turtle time.

The thing is, you can’t really think about something else when you’re singing. It’s a revelation I’ve had over and over again when performing onstage. Maybe at first you’re thinking about the nerves or the crowd or getting the levels right in your monitor. But then you lock in. You go liquid, finding the fissures in the sheer face of time and trickling down, saturating the earth with the sound.

I felt this while giving birth two years ago—how I sang as the baby dropped in my body, low vocalizations that rose with the waves of the contractions, the only way I could dissolve the pain and meet the moment.

I felt this at my friend’s mother’s burial two weeks ago—how I sang as I stood over the willow casket laced with lavender and peonies, my voice gathering strength against the grief in my throat, understanding that nothing else mattered in that moment but this act of love. Saturating the earth with the sound.

There is presence in song.

There is life and death in song.

Sometimes it’s not enough to get outside. We have to get outside ourselves—which is no small task. It reminds me of something my mother used to say when I’d get visibly annoyed at her as a teenager. At least you can get away from me! she’d crow with a laugh. I can’t get away from me!

Singing allows me to sidestep myself; it seems to come from someplace else. It feels ancestral—a river of melody issuing out of me like the great Ganges that cleansed my kin. My body is the bellows, yes, but the song belongs to something beyond.

I realize now that the antidote to a life lived too fast—to a life without brakes, without breaks—is not just to slow down. It’s to remember the thing that most brings you into presence with the world, to hold it tight, to cast it like starlight against the black rush of days.