Take Your Time With the Tangles

The Iroquois have a beautiful story about how peace came to their confederacy. Once, their land was full of war because of an evil leader named Atotarho, whose body was twisted with hatred and whose hair was full of snakes. But Hiawatha convinced Atotarho to let him comb the snakes out of his hair. Thus, through patience, hostility was transformed into peace.

We tend to be very impatient. And when we must be patient, we tend to be so only by way of distraction. If we sit on a ten-hour flight, we watch three bad movies in a row. If we run on the treadmill for an hour, we make sure to listen to a podcast. In other words, we deal with difficulty by trying to kill time.

But as Thoreau said, you can’t kill time without injuring eternity. At the end of your flight or workout, you emerge with no more wisdom about how life works than before. This is actually why we have war. The reason we don’t learn from the suffering and senselessness of past conflicts is that we weren’t really ever there. We hid out in distraction and therefore learned nothing we could take with us into the future.

One reason it’s hard to be present is that, like Atotarho, our bodies are twisted with all the stress and pain we’ve endured but never let into our awareness. And so, if we’re going to find any peace, inside or out, we have to learn to take our time.

If you focus on your breath, you’ll see that it contains all the tightness and tension of a lifetime. But if you can just let the breath be tight and watch it, something extraordinary happens. The body starts to fill with ease and wellbeing, and great masses of tension unravel, just as hair patiently combed at some point falls smooth and straight.

So take your time with the tangles. It is how we do things, rather than how fast we do them, that determines the arc of our lives.