my 3 year old pace car

It seems like since we came back from Lost Valley, life is moving at thousands of miles an hour around us. Today things seemed to move especially fast. I was on the highway doing 70 in a 60 in the slow lane and getting passed and having people try to put their cars in the hatch of mine. I got pushed out of the way in line today to get an allergy shot (no small feat if you've seen me. Apparently this woman needed to get in front of me so she could hurry up and wait for twenty minutes after her shot like everyone else. But I digress.
For the last few months I have been thinking and moving toward finding ways to slow life down. I've read some great books and spent time going through lots of web sites and in good conversations. I'm going to add a "slow" links set to the blog in the next couple of days to share some of what I'm finding.
But here's the thing.
In all of the reading and thinking and talking, walking with Nathan last week taught me more about how to be slow and the beauty of it than anything else I've messed with. Walking uphill in the mountains with a tired three year old is not a fast exercise. There is no way to hurry it up and why would you want to? We saw every flower, bug, dead mouse, dog, horse, bat, and cowboy there was to see. We talked about what we had been doing and what we were going to do. We drank juice boxes. We dropped things and picked them back up. We picked up things and then decided to drop them. We stopped to say funny things and then stopped in the same place the next day to remember the funny things we said the day before. We never got winded or tired (at 8000 feet above sea level). We held hands, always holding hands.
I was thinking about that speed while I was getting shoved and run over today. I want to go slow. I want to move at three years old. Experience all of it and enjoy it along the way. A lot of people don't get that, but for me and Nathan it's the only way worth going.
Won't you join us?
j