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Posted in Balanced Lifestyle | March 20, 2010 | 7 Comments
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Image by How do you usually walk? Are you a fast walker who gets ahead of everybody or are you a slow walker who enjoys looking around while leisurely strolling to a destination? According to one study people can recognize their friends without seeing their faces by their walk. The way you walk is one of the characteristic traits that you maintain your entire life.
Your life is a long walk and you choose the pace for this walk too. Your experiences and successes in life greatly depend on the pace that you choose. Walking on your feet is a physical activity that you can easily monitor but walking through life is often more difficult to control.
Choosing the right pace for your life is like choosing the right strategy for the race. If you try to sprint at the beginning of a marathon then you won’t have any strength left to finish it. If you use marathon speed for a speed race then you’ll be a tortoise competing with hares.
You have your own speed to move through life and if you use your natural pace then all your efforts will be successful and all your goals will be easy to reach. If you use the wrong speed then you will experience burnout and failure time after time.
I am good at long distance running and this is the best pace for me to reach any of my goals. I take life one step at a time and I can keep this speed up for a very long time. I have enough patience to work at long term goals without expecting any fast results. If I try to do something fast and put all my strength into one forceful move (sprinting basically) then I will fail most of the time. I was always one of the worst short distance runners in school.
Identify your pace
Think about your life and goals that you have reached successfully. What was your strategy?
Analyze goals that turned into disasters. What was your pace then?
You can clearly see how your pace affects your life and now you just have to build your life based on the right speed.
Pace and happiness
You have probably heard and used the expression “Take your time” at least a thousand times in your life. It is important to take your time in life and spend as much time as needed accomplishing your goals. When you do something on your own time you feel how much energy, patience and effort each task takes. Having control over life brings happiness.
Forced pace of life
Sometimes you are forced to live a faster life. At work you have deadlines or you need to do something faster in order to get a promotion. In your daily life you have to move faster in order to get more done (go grocery shopping, pick up your children from school, finish a cleaning project, fix supper etc.) This speed is not natural for you and that is why you need to slow down.
Life that is too fast is unhealthy (it has been linked to increased risks of cardiovascular disease, higher levels of stress and decreased libido) and consequently unbalanced. You have to look at your priorities in life and figure out what is unnecessary in your life. Follow Leo Babauta’a advice and start doing more by doing less (this is an affiliate link).
Plan your life according to your pace
As I have already said I am a tortoise in life and this is the pace that I maintain in everything. If you are like me then you should set long-term goals and slowly start breaking them down into small steps. Work some and rest some and wait some. Eventually you will get where you want to be.
If you are a fast person then you should set short-term goals. These goals might require a lot of effort and work but they must be accomplished in a week or month. After you have successfully reached a goal give yourself time to relax and get ready for the next sprint. The life of constant short term challenges will be rewarding and balanced for you.
What is your pace in life? Do you always maintain it? Feel free to share your experience in the comment section below.
Keep it balanced!
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Smart Thoughts (7)
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Hello, 
I like cycles – sprint of hard work then rest. My life is similar to a rollercoaster, but it works for me. I never actually thought of the importance of identifying your pace, I’ll have to think back of my goals that I haven’t reach and see if it was the wrong pace that took me there. Great article as always Anastasiya!
Hi Lana,
it’s good to see a person who uses an absolutely different strategy (pace) in life. I can see that your strategy definitely works for you!
Anastasiya,
I like the whole idea of thinking about pace. Sometimes I try to be very calm and recollected when I’m walking so that I can approach my tasks in that same calmness. Other times, I notice that I’m walking like a mad man, and it’s those times when I know my brain is scattered. I think people have different paces. Lana brings up an interesting point about cycles. The book “The Power of Full Engagement” speaks about the same thing: they suggest like should be more like sprinting but with good breaks in between. I think we’re all different.
Thanks for another thoughtful post.
Peace!
Fr. Michael,
you brought you a very good point about using your physical pace to control the pace of your mind and life. I think that can be a really useful technique especially when you are trying to slow down in life.
I think that it is great that all of us have different paces in life. It means that we all can reach our goals in different ways and the goal that might be unreachable for one person will be easy to get for another. In the end we all can learn a little bit from each other and try different paces every once in a while and see how they will work for us.
I’m a slow walker in general, but I love speed in my sport for example. It’s like in photography for me- when you are on the street you need to be fast, but when you are in nature you have to be slow. It depends on situation. With friends I like to be slow.
Anastasiya, you’re right each of us needs to move at whatever pace is right for us – and most of the time that’s slower not faster. I find that when I move to fast in my own life I make mistakes and then have to start over again. Move slowly, think deeply and leave your mark on life – too fast and too soon and all you leave behind are skid marks. Thank you for such an insightful post.
Hi Angela,
it is true that when we move slower we often have more time to think and to figure out what exactly we have to do. I also had a few times in life when I rushed and I ended up in a complete mess. When I take my time to think about things and analyze everything I usually make the right choices.
Thanks for stopping by!