Slow down at the drive-thru, slow down that high speed internet, and hop out of the express check-out lane. With such a short life and limited time to live it, why don't we slow down and enjoy every piece of it?

We all know that there are things much more fun than waiting in the grocery store in a ten minute line as opposed to a five minute line. But when the day is over, it's just a line and we really need those groceries. Who knows, you could meet your soul mate while standing there. With the dramatically and fascinating advancements in technology, everything is made to move so quickly. As awesome as these improvements are, they have the unfortunate ability to make us forget what it's like to take our time.

Yes, we want our internet to load with the snap of our finger and our messages to send the moment we hit the send button, but when is fast, fast enough? It is true that the faster we get the simpler things are completed - picking up lunch, checking emails, and sending messages, etc. With a quicker pace, it leaves us with more time there is to do other, more important things. These things include making it home twenty minutes early to eat dinner, getting to the store ten minutes faster, or finding google search results quicker than we ever could.

With the age of speed, it's easy to love this magical saving of time. However, it can also be a plague in disguise. The speed-racer life style can become easily addicting. The more we get used to doing everything as fast as we can, the more we do just that (everything as fast as we can). Even special stuff that is meant to be enjoyed becomes a test against time. We begin to count down the minutes until family dinner is over so we can get back to Netflix, we start screaming at our computers when fast as light is no longer fast enough, and we can't bear to be without our phones for the duration of a movie. The latter has more to do with the near addiction to being constantly connected to the world that most of us are harshly guilty of, but the addiction to moving fast is still present. The phone can't possibly be put down because something may be missed while you're away from it for those two hours. If that happens, then you'll have to take the time to catch up, and that just can't happen because it takes far too much of our time (just kidding, kinda). 

The irony of the high-speed addiction is that we often complain and worry about how short it is, yet we want to do most things as fast as we can. This is going beyond the routine chores- everything is connected. In fact, in France, the French typically take nearly three hours or more for lunch and dinner. They don't complain when their food takes more than twenty minutes. The French have mastered the art of slowing down and simply appreciating life in all of its beauty and patience. It's time to adopt this lifestyle and start welcoming it as our own. Really, it's nice to just slow down.