My mother used to call me a tortoise.
I spent an hour on the worksheet that I could have done in 10 minutes. Not because I didn’t know how to do it, but because I would spend a minute, just carefully pulling the pencil across the paper to make my letters nice and neat.
They weren’t.
I soon learned that slow was not appreciated. No one liked slow. No one wanted slow. I had to get up fast, brush my teeth fast, get dressed fast, do my homework fast, play fast, eat fast, fast fast fast. I rushed my homework so that my mother would call me a horse instead. My grandmother said it didn’t matter even if I was a horse because I would be a slow horse. A child born in the evening would prefer to take things at a sedate pace, she said.
For me it was true.
At 12 years old, the achievement of the year was successfully mastering the piece labelled ‘Presto’ after my fingers tripped over the keys a million times. After learning all my scales and pieces, the next step to perfection was ‘faster’.
It was a race against time to be better sooner. To achieve more than the other people my age. It wasn’t enough that I was good. I had to be the best at a faster rate. If my brother could memorize an essay in ten minutes, I shouldn’t need thirty to do the same. If he completed his Piano exams at 15, I shouldn’t need to take an extra year. If he could do Form 5 Science papers at age 12, why was I scoring lower.
Harder, stronger, better, faster.
Faster
An eternal race for time, to master everything in the short few years of our schooling life so that it would look good on our resumes. It would bolster our chances in the job market.
I’m 25. I’m studying in a huge university. Faster, faster, faster still. Publish this semester, finish your lab work by September, write your thesis by January, viva voce in March, graduate in August. Enter again in September, this time repeat all that as a PhD student.
The latest car, 0 to 200 mph in under 10 seconds.
The youngest doctor, finishing medical school in 2 years.
The newest phone, 0.01ms response time.
The best medication, takes effect in 20 minutes.
My pistons are churning, but there’s only so much friction I can take. Information is flooding in, 1gb per second but my Internal memory cannot process it all. And people keep telling me “You’re already 25” like my life is already over.
Several months ago, I stopped at the roadside to admire the butterflies dancing among the bushes. People walked by, nonplussed. I was just standing there, staring off into space. Most of them looked, but could not see the bright yellow fluttering wings. They could not understand why I was standing there, or perhaps they did not have the time to care. Only one girl paused, sparing a few seconds to smile. But she was on her way soon enough.
As we chased the ticking seconds, chanting ‘faster, faster, faster’, it seemed that we had missed all of life’s little beauties.
As a child, I was preoccupied with so many other commitments and classes, engaged with becoming the best all rounded student within the shortest time, that I was never invited to hang out with the others. I couldn’t. I had classes every afternoon. What else had I missed in the quest for speed?
If learning is a life-long process, why are we cramming so much into the first 17 years of our life?
I cannot go too fast anymore. At 100 km per hour, my heart races, uneasy. At that speed, most car crashes are fatal. At the rate I’m going, pushing myself to do things faster, I am missing the little things that make me me. I’m killing my identity.
So I’m hitting the brakes, slowing my steps to take a breather.
After all, I am only 25.