Life Is Better, Slower

shade tree

On a blistering hot day trekking across northern Spain on the El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, my wife and I huddled in the shade of a tree with other trekkers from all over Europe. We had reached the mid-section of the journey, the famous breadbasket of Spain. Fields of grain spread in every direction all day, every day. There were few places to get shelter from the sun. That afternoon, we had come around a corner, saw the tree in the distance with a wide circumference of shade, and picked up our pace to get some respite from the sun.

As we got closer, we saw we were not the first trekkers to stop under the shade of that old tree. Most of the shadow was already taken by trekkers who had reached there before us. But we found a small parcel of shade just big enough to get comfortably out of the sun. We took off our backpacks, got out some water, and sat on the grass for a few minutes of cooler temperatures.

While we sat under the tree, a young-ish man hurried by on the path a few feet from the shade-tree community. He neither looked at the shade lovers nor slowed his pace as if deciding to stop and cool down. As he rushed past, several people commented that he looked late for a meeting. We all chuckled. Then someone said some words I have not forgotten: “He must be an American,” and I could hear murmurs of agreement. In my inland Pacific Northwest high mountain plains twang, I asked, “How do you know he is an American?”

Someone under the tree immediately answered: “Americans are always in a hurry.”

That was in 2014. That shade-tree conversation was a brilliant moment for me. I didn’t resist the point. The voice had an accent, for all I knew, the accent of heaven! Since then, I’ve begun slowly adjusting the pace of my life in the hope of getting “hurry” out of my life.

In the rest of this article, I will tell you about a deliberate decision helping me eliminate hurry from my life: develop a skill and habit that requires me to slow down. The skill I’ve been slowly acquiring is baking. This morning, I made hand pies with apple filling. I’ll tell you about the choice to learn how to bake. I’ll share the recipe if you want to bake some apple hand pies over your own this fall.