The Luxury of Slowness

Back-to-back calls from all over the world, employees running around shouting, files being tossed here and there. That summed up a typical day for her. A day in her cubicle. Where a trip to the cooler or the coffeemaker defined her breaks. Where the only familiar thing was the phone she handled. Where a million things passed through her head every single second. And that day, she just ran out of steam. She had to get out. She felt as though she was choking. Yearning for a breath of fresh air, for a feel of the earth underneath, for a whiff of the scintillating wilderness, she ran.

A few hours passed. She found herself standing on a footbridge over a creek. Her dad used to take her there when she was little. This place used to define absolute happiness for her. She watched the tiny waves and ripples that made the stream look stunningly beautiful. It had this intriguing slowness about it. She looked at the ripples carrying the silt away with a slow grandeur. She thought to herself, why wasn't this a part of her anymore. This slowness with which she used to be madly in love. It had become a luxury. Something distant, out of her reach.

She thought of the endless possibilities. Things that could have been. Things that used to excite each and every cell of her body. The sweet notes of the violin, the dense strokes of her paint brush - her kind of drugs. She used to touch horizons of ecstasy indulging in them. As she stared at the slow and smooth flow of the stream, tears started rolling out. It wasn't sorrow. It wasn't regret. They were tears of realization. Wiping them off, she walked away. She disappeared into the crowds with a conscience as calm as the sea after a storm.