It starts with an unexpected errand or a long overdue checkup, then an afternoon at home moving your plants back outside after an unexpected frost forced them indoors.

You want to do this and that, zoom here and there because that is what you are used to doing. Now with your schedule opening up--only two more days of the semester left--you are tempted to keep adding to you day, filling up those extra hours until you are at your limit.

And the life stops you.  You oversleep first, a gentle reminder of how tired you really are. Then you need to create space in your day for a checkup. Then your car, your trusty cruise-mobile, needs more TLC than you can take care of on your own, so phone calls are made, appointments penciled in, and you are required to slow down.  The big pre-vacation plans go out the window in favor of slow days tending to yourself, your things, your life.   

You are grateful for these reminders, these little stops put in place to help you unplug from unnecessarily busy living.  You take your breather over your canteen of lemon water as you wait for your car to get polished up.  You pause in the waiting room of the doctor's office to listen to your heart beat in a steady tattoo.  You allow yourself the time it takes to move your plants in then out of the house.   

Slowly, always slowly. There is nothing worth doing that isn't done slowly.