Don’t rush.

Ever since the Knicks won the title in five, I’ve had this little clipping perched on my mousepad: “Don’t rush. The key is the flow out of which the shot comes.” This was Bill Bradley, “exhorting the Knicks in Game 1 when they were trailing.”

When they were trailing.

It’s been a summer of trailing for me, with some highs and many unexpected lurches sideways. I’ve always been a busy girl, known for this in my family, as well as the ability to organize the heck out of a jewelry drawer. But somehow this year, it was too hard to keep up, to go at a crazed pace blading out quilt patches, stitching them up, thinking about a few pieces to add to my wardrobe, navigating through some bumps in relationships, keeping up my appearances at doctors’ offices (plural), and the cleaning, and errands, and cooking, and other self-assigned-and-assigned jobs that had my name on them.

The key is the flow out of which the shot comes.

Maybe I’ve kept that there because I keep thinking I need to slow down?

Or, maybe the flow is just paying more attention?

The British art critic, John Berger, who trained as a painter before shifting to criticism believed that attention was “not a passive, individual state but rather an action.” According to A.O.Scott, who wrote about him for the New York Times, “[w]e don’t just see what’s in front of our eyes. We interpret it, looking for patterns and meanings and associations. How we do this depends on where we are, who we’re with and how we see ourselves.” Scott wrote that Berger “grew skeptical of modernity and acutely aware of the costs of technological progress, which brings in its wake dispossession, alienation and amnesia along with efficiency, speed and convenience.”

Regretfully, I’ve had to pare down, set aside some of my favorite things during this time period, and not just in the quilting realm. This is not easy because I’ve always lived by just-stuff-more-things-in around-the-edges credo (in other words, the opposite of working in flow). Sadly, I’ve suffered some losses because of this slowing down. I needed days when I could inch along at a snail’s pace and see the “patterns and meanings and associations” not only in my work as a quilter, but also in my family, in my communities. Sometimes we are so busy rushing the basket that we forget the game, which is kind of why — I guess — I keep that saying front and center, right by the little mouse that clicks my way through a day, navigating the “cost of technological progress,” with its hurry-hurry and its more-more.

Most days I need less-less.