Slowicism 1.0

The older I’ve gotten, the more stoic I’ve become.

Stoicism is an incredibly pragmatic philosophy for dealing with things that don’t go according to plan. The main idea is that if something goes awry, you can personally work on controlling your own reaction.

Sometimes, your reaction is even worse than the situation you’re reacting to! I might have watched this happen a few dozen times in the restaurant business; we called it being in the weeds. This can lead to a chain reaction of sorts:

In addition to the injuries, there’s the tendency to drop breakable things onto the floor, or to overcook food while you’re focusing on other food. Naturally, this makes life much harder for the kitchen manager and for your coworkers, whose emotional energy is palpable. You can feel the loathing and resentment directed at you for not being up for the job.

In other words, freaking out makes things way worse. This is even more evident in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, when you’re in a bad situation. This happened to me one notable time when I was competing, and the dude tried to yank free from a leglock. I felt his knee snap three times, and you might be able to see the stunned look on my face in this tiny pic:

Dealing with a bad situation in jiu jitsu or judo has been good practice for life. If you don’t follow the practice of calmly assessing the situation, you can make your situation far worse—but how can you get there?

My answer draws upon a concept I pitched as a shared piece with

Michael Woudenberg

over at Polymathic Being. We were going to coordinate one of those ping-pong brain bounces I enjoy creating (like Ode to Whiskey or When Blue Makes White, but we’ve both had a lot on our plates, and it is my hope that Michael can pick up this brain candy and do a part 2 at some point in the future.

I touched on this concept a bit during Pause and Paraphrase:

If the waiter tells you there are no more hamburgers and your initial inclination is, Wow, I thought this was a professional establishment that didn’t run out of things it advertised, it’s time to pause and paraphrase.

Oh dang, I’d heard so many good things about the burger! What do you recommend instead? will probably keep bad things from being done to your food.

Pausing is a great trick if you can pull it off, but this only works when you can create a moment to collect your thoughts. You can’t exactly do this when someone is trying to maul you on the jiu jitsu mats… can you?

Well, kind of. You can’t just say “time out” and collect your thoughts, but there are definitely moments where you can think as you’re reacting. You don’t need those fast, fleeting thoughts, though—you’ve got plenty of those going through your brain at hundreds of miles per hour, but what you need is slower, more methodical thought.

You need deep and wide thinking, but not fast thinking.

In moments of stress, time perception can do funny things. Something that takes a few seconds can feel like a few minutes, and this very act is your superpower. If you’ve ever felt even more anxious because time is passing so painfully slowly, you’ve already got a head start on Slowicism: slowing things down and assessing the situation.

Everything in your body is telling you to speed up, but Slowicism tells you to slow down. The challenge is that your heart is pumping blood through your entire body at breakneck speed, and that includes your brain. Your brain is going, going, going—but it needs slowing, slowing, slowing.

Time dilation doesn’t just take place in physics, but having this variable perception of time doesn’t have to be all bad, either. The trick is to mentally reframe everything as it’s coming in, so that you see the chaos enveloping you as a part of your natural environment you will eventually tame with your entropy shield in place.

If Stoicism requires that you accept what you can’t control, Slowicism wants you to take advantage of your altered perception of time.

Now, this is really just an introduction to a goofy phrase that I think really captures the essence of this strategy, but to really do this idea justice, we’re going to hope for a part two—and don’t forget to check out the comments, where you are automatically 75% better looking after leaving a comment: