Get Off the Hamster Wheel
Our culture tells us the faster the better, and if fast is really better, then faster is even better. Well, unless you are a race car driver or a sprinter, fast is not always best. We all seem to sprint through life from one thing to another, oftentimes those things are good and noble, but in the midst of breakneck speed what we miss is the beauty of life. Faster and faster. Round and round we go. Dizzying. Exhausting. Impossible to sustain.
This quote by Eddie Cantor sums up what I am trying to say – Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.”
Who is Eddie Cantor you might ask? He was a singer, comedian, vaudeville star, actor, and radio and television personality. Eddie got his start in show biz with the Ziegfeld Follies in New York City in 1917. Maybe as important, if not more important, Eddie was involved with The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, founded in 1938 by President Franklin Roosevelt, and that foundation’s main fundraising event was setting up booths at Christmas asking people to donate a dime to fight polio and other birth defects. From that, Eddie coined the term, The March of Dimes, and in 1976 the organization adopted March of Dimes as its name.
If you are like most people, you try to juggle many balls at once, run from one thing to another, collapse into bed at night, only to get up tomorrow and start all over.
I am not saying all of life is intended to be spent sitting in a rocking chair on the porch or a beach chair at the ocean. What I am saying is look over all the things you do and ask yourself; “what things are most important things to me, and what stuff can I dump over the side of the boat.” Yes, there are times in your life when the pace is fast and you do fly around at high speed, often while juggling many balls, but even then, take time to enjoy the scenery as it whizzes by.
Since my stroke in 2021, due to some neurological deficits, I have been forced to both slow down and as much as possible, avoid situations that create chaos in my brain. One of the things I have fallen in love with is JOMO – the joy of missing out, disconnecting as a form of self-care.
In addition to slowing down, to find real meaning and purpose in life, we really need to look no further than to God. We read this in Ecclesiastes 2:24 – “A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God.”
Ecclesiastes is sometimes hard to understand, and if taken out of context, this passage seems to be advocating a life of mere pleasure seeking. But it is not saying that at all. What it tells us is that only in God does life have real meaning and purpose, which offers true pleasure. Without Him nothing satisfies, but with him, we find satisfaction and enjoyment. Our God is a generous God, and we can enjoy His good provisions.
So, today, look to God for meaning and purpose, and don’t buy into the world’s roadmap of “faster and faster.” That roadmap is nothing more than a hamster wheel that just goes “round and round.”
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