Ana leapt up awakened by violent blows. There was a knock on the door of her apartment.
No. Her heart was pounding.
5:30am. On a Monday morning, the street was quiet.
She sank under the duvet and closed her eyes.
Everyone was sound asleep in the building. It was an hour before her alarm went off.
The beating started again. What was going on? The beat seemed to accelerate and her bed began to spin like a merry-go-round. If only she could stop it.
The alarm clock went off.
6:30am. How could it be? Had she been awake for an hour?
Ana had just broken up with her boyfriend who left on a year-long trip.
Since the break-up she felt lonely and started considering going on a trip as well.
The beating on the door started again. No, it was her heart. She needed some fresh air.
Ana got up to open the bedroom window. Taking a deep breath she wished for a resting day and forgetting about the past week.
7h30am. Already?
Sitting on the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in her hands and feet on a chair, the aroma of coffee smoked softly through the warm morning light painting patterns on the floor. The night had been restless, she wished to be able to sleep longer, enjoy breakfast quietly and take a long hot shower.
The day before had passed quickly too. Her life seemed to be beating at a frantic pace.
She needed to slow down. Living at her own pace had become almost unreachable.
Getting back to her rhythm, but where to start?
It becomes complicated to put your personal values first and say no to the value of your surroundings, which are always insistent.
The confrontation between personal and external values will create a cognitive dissonance, generating stress, anxiety, feelings of insecurity and instability.
Who wants to live like this in the long term?
We can learn to play with our attention span and learn to master the art of accelerating time in order to live life in a more restful way. For example, small rituals can create temporal refuges to have moments of peace: hot drinks (5mn), music (3mn), deep breathing (5mn), self-massage (1mn), active walking (5mn).
Daniel Presles 