The doctor said: you need to slow down.
She'd heard this before, from various sources, in various registers. She'd received it as a compliment dressed as concern — you work so hard, you should be kinder to yourself. She'd filed it under things people say and continued.
But the doctor said it with test results in front of her. Said it with specificity. Said it the way doctors say things when they mean it precisely and not figuratively.
She sat in the car in the hospital car park for twenty minutes.
Then she drove home and sat at the kitchen table.
The pace of her life was not abstract. It was concrete and accounted for. It was the five a.m. alarm, the back-to-back meetings, the evenings that began with work and ended with work and found their way eventually to a dinner eaten too quickly in front of a screen. It was the holidays that became working holidays. The weekends she was proud of getting through efficiently.
The pace had felt like achievement. It had felt like control.
She understood now that it had been neither of those things. It had been avoidance wearing a productive face.
She was afraid to slow down because slow down was where things were.
She sat at the kitchen table for a long time.
Then she started, slowly, to become acquainted with what was there.
Slowing down is not stopping. It is arriving.
