Moving Faster Than My Body

The setting is the airport in Seattle, where I am waiting for the red-eye to Virginia so I can try and sleep my way into Eastern Standard Time. My teaching and consulting requires a certain amount of traveling – if you need to know how much travel, it is just a few trips more than my wife can stand me being on.

So I’m sitting here thinking – the moving walkway in the last stretch between gates A10 and A11 threw me a bit. I held firmly to the handrail, already in the sleep-deprived stupor that I hoped to take advantage of once in flight, when I realized that my feet were moving faster than my hands. Or, more accurately, the treadmill part of the walkway was moving faster than the handrail, and my body was being slowly pulled back away from my legs.

I was moving faster than I could move. Or at least part of me was moving faster than I could keep up.

Easily solved; let go of the handrail and straighten up. Works on the moving walkway; but does that work as a metaphor in life? When moving faster than your body can keep up, should one let go of that which is moving slower?

Or is the real answer to not be on a walkway that moves faster than the handrail?

Sometimes, I imagine, the latter. Perhaps more often, the former.

But I so love clutching the handrail.

It makes it easier to go through life in a sleep-deprived stupor.

Just my thoughts,

Sean