What Speed Means to Marketplace Listeners

		Read More Speed Commentaries • Straight Up • Define Our Goals • At What Cost? • Time and Fruit • Workaholism • Faster and Faster • Overcoming Limitations • Length of Time • A State of Mind • Theory of Relativity • What About Honolulu? • A New Career From Speed • Speed Is Nothing New • It's All Relative • We're Being Sold Speed • Speed Means Missing Out • Time is Priceless • The Ride Keeps Getting Faster • Family First • Slowing Down for Frugality • Speed Serves Me • A Fortunate Layoff • Interruptions • Our Country's Material Obsession • A Personal Slowdown • Using Speed to My Advantage • I Don't Miss Much • Not Enough Hours In the Day • Peaceful • Speed, Oh Speed • Out of Control • I Live By Speed • Happy to Be Relaxed • Speed Is Choice Index of Comments

Straight Up (June 30)
I am addicted to speed. Not a pill, but the real thing: living and driving fast, flying coast to coast and country to country. I am a product of our times, an acceleration in physical and mental activity that began perhaps in the Renaissance, shifted into second with the 1700s Enlightenment (where our modern concepts of time and progress came aboard, plus tea and coffee were introduced in the West), hit third gear during the Industrial Revolution (and our own political revolution), and put the pedal to the metal in the 1900s with Einstein, the use of internal combustion engine, heavier-than-air flight, splitting the atom, computer technology, space probes ever onward and upward. We are now beyond overdrive. Mars or bust!

Put this speeding up on a timeline chart. What a wave we’re riding now. The gradual millennial plodding from cave dwelling to urbanites is a spectacular graphic. After a slow base building over 10,000 years, gains in population and use of natural resources had gradually slanted upward. Over the last two centuries (the last quarter inch of a 10,000-year yardstick) the increase in people and their use of stuff extracted from the earth or growing things from the earth has gone from horse speed to train speed to auto speed to prop then jet plane sped to a rocket trajectory that shoots nearly straight up.

A chart reader shudders at the sight—whether it is the population, oil pumping/usage, or the stock market, straight up is unsustainable. Our short-sightedness due to greed (the bedrock principle of capitalism) makes us look and act on what’s happening in three to six months rather than a decade or a generation, or much less the seven generations the Iroquois used as their benchmark for future-affecting decisions.

Most of us who’ve lived through a half century of this ever-increasing amount and speed of everything around us acknowledge the thrill of hot rods, rock & roll, interstates, jetting to Rio or Cancun, eating strawberries in midwinter, instant communication, and microwave grits. For some of us the thrill is almost gone. When we sit back and quietly assess what we have given up for this joy ride, it ain’t worth it. Where is perspective, community, wisdom, and wholeness when the dust settles?

Am I going to sell my car and ride a bike? No, but I walk to the post office sometimes twice a day just to get fresh air, exercise, and communion with the catalpa, hackberry, and holly trees, and mockingbirds. Years ago I rode my bike several miles to work as a stockbroker in Tucson—it was cool & downhill at 6:45 a.m. So I wore a coat over my suit; and as it got hot in the afternoon peddling uphill (through the Univ. of Arizona campus with long-legged coeds in shorts), I had to peel off overcoat, suit coat, and tie on the way. These days I’m happy to walk a couple of miles on the meandering walking path in Okeena Park in town, where more and more people promenade.

Since interstates (esp. I-40) are jam-packed with semis and SUVs, I take the blue highways when I can, see the small towns that thrived before the interstates. It takes longer, but I’m keenly aware that the way I get around directly affects my mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. (When I revert to the teenage Murray in the Austin Healey, God help me!)

Murray Hudson
Halls, TN

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