Sometimes when I look up into the night sky I watch the stars. Tonight I found myself noticing satellites. Quite of few of them soared overhead in the 30 minutes or so that I spent looking up – heading in all different directions. That got me reflecting on the speed with which change is occurring in the world. It wasn’t until the year after I was born that the first humanly created object reached orbit. I was in college before I realized that you could actually see a satellite fly by. My mother remembered when her family got their first telephone. My grandfather was alive when the Wright brothers first achieved powered flight. I remember getting our first color TV. I was out of school and working before I owned my first computer, and now I carry vastly more computing power in my pocket. The internet still seems new. I’ve owned music on LPs, 8-track cartridges, cassettes, CDs, iPods, and now I just stream whatever I want to hear by asking Siri to play it for me. My car has the ability to keep itself in the lane and slow down when coming up behind a slower moving vehicle. Social norms are constantly changing (sometimes for the better, and sometimes not so much). We keep learning how to treat each other better, while at the same time we are constantly inventing new ways to mistreat and abuse each other. 

Sometimes (often) I grow weary and overwhelmed at the speed of change. I’m not entirely sure we humans were built to move this fast. But since that seems to be what’s happening (whether I like it or not), I suppose perhaps it would be helpful if I stopped arguing with reality. Yes, it gets to be “too much” sometimes, but it can also be amazing. And I can remember to slow down from time to time. A few years ago I spent 40 days walking across Spain, never traveling faster than about 3 miles per hour. It was refreshing and restorative. I’m not really sure where this line of pondering is taking me, except that it can be helpful to pay attention to my life, and to notice what’s going on around me and within me, so that I can be an active participant in my life instead of being just a passenger. I may not have a choice about how fast the world is changing, but I always have a choice about how I respond to and interact with that change. And I don’t remember that fact nearly often enough.