Finding ways to stop the whirl

Feb. 5, 2004

Dear David,

Even in Cape Girardeau, the world seems to be moving at hyper-speed these days. We want high-speed Internet service and cars that zoom. We want faster service in restaurants if we aren't ordering fast food.

"Fast food, fast life," an old friend used to warn.

I used to wish I was a fast runner. But there's little you can do about being slow-footed. You lose your races and try golf. Some people buzz around the course in little carts. They don't like going slow.

You're having a hard time thinking of Cape Girardeau as a fast-paced town. You're right. The best entertainment in Cape Girardeau right now is driving across the new Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge, making a U-turn at the carpet store in East Cape Girardeau and coming back to see how the bridge looks once again from the north side.

But that's because the bridge is magnificent, not because there's nothing else to do, nowhere else to go in a hurry. When the lights are turned on later this month we'll need a traffic cop at the carpet store.

There were Sunday nights here when I was 19 when I felt sorry for myself for being born in the deadest burg on Earth.

Sunday is the saddest night of the week anywhere. Here at the end of the 1960s you know it was nowhere, nothing, slow-motion. Nobody wants that at 19. I wanted Daytona Beach, a car my parents wouldn't drive, Jimi Hendrix singing "Fire" in my ear and a girl who wanted to have fun by my side.

Back in Cape Girardeau many years, some beaches and a few girls later, I don't feel sorry for myself anymore. I don't want to spend one more second sunning myself in a Southern California traffic jam, one more minute waiting in a line at an overpriced restaurant, one more hour waiting for tomorrow, one more day dreaming that I'm somewhere else. I like it here, now.

Life delivers up times when slow-motion is all you want, all you need. Then the cycle begins again.

Rumi writes:

"I was happy enough to stay still

inside the pearl inside the shell

but the hurricane of experience

lashed me out of hiding and made me

a wave moving into shore, saying loudly

the ocean's secret as I went, and then

spent there, I slept like fog against

the cliff, another stillness."

The world will not slow itself. Each of us has to find our own brake, a method that brings the blur to a standstill. Yoga brings me out of my head and back into my body. Everybody needs something: A prayer, meditation or a physical means of discovering peace and silence and union with the source of your being.

Eight centuries ago, Rumi learned how to stop the world through the alchemy of the whirling dervish. When you whirl, the world moves yet you stay still. Your stillness is the center of the world.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.