Slow down

Experiment with your pace.

This week, I want to suggest an experiment. Find a familiar short path, and walk it at your regular speed. As you take each step, count your paces quietly. As well as feeling the rhythm in your feet, you'll hear the tempo in your ears.

As you become familiar with your pace, you can start to play with it. Let the speed of your talking slow and allow your feet to follow. Halve your pace. Halve it again. Keep going, slower and slower, and notice how the physical act of walking changes as you approach it more deliberately.

Approaching stillness, perception shifts. Balance becomes harder if you are on one leg for longer. But can you feel the ease spread upwards as your elevated foot comes to rest? Sense the shifting of weight from hip to hip, the pull of gravity, the delicious elegance of slowness.

Walk slowly, then even slower