Give Yourself a Pretty Reason to Slow Down

If you see your kinsman's donkey collapsed under its load on the road, don't look away; stop, and help him lift it. That one line sits seventy-four laws deep into this week's parasha, which contains more commandments than any other portion in the Torah.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks counts this among Judaism's life-changing ideas, and the idea itself is almost embarrassingly plain: never be in too much of a rush to stop for someone who needs help.

You already knew that, and so did I, but knowing something and doing something about it are two different events, and most of us live almost entirely inside the first one.

Which is why I want to sit for a moment with what has to happen before a person is capable of stopping for a fallen donkey at all. You cannot help someone lift a burden while you are pinned under your own. We rush because we believe we are doing something urgent, and sometimes we are, but underneath the urgency there is usually stress, or the need to prove we are worth something, or the quiet fear that if we stop moving the whole arrangement will collapse without us.

I knew this the way most people know it, which is to say not at all, until about three weeks into our recent vacation in Greece, when slowing down stopped being something I knew and became something closer to a fact about my body. It wasn't ignorance. I'd just gotten so used to calling my exhaustion "busy" that I'd stopped noticing it was exhaustion at all.

Feng shui concept: rushing chi

Feng shui is usually described as a practice of arranging objects. What the arranging is actually doing, more often than not, is something simpler: governing how quickly energy is allowed to move through a space.

Chi behaves like water and like people: a straight, unobstructed path accelerates it and carries it out the other side, while something to curve around or settle beside slows it enough to gather and accumulate.

Rushing chi is the diagnosis for this condition, and it isn't a metaphor. A front door aligned with a back door or a large window sends everything that enters straight back out again. A long corridor with bare walls gives the eye nothing to catch on. In these places the energy behaves the way an overextended person behaves inside her own week, moving in a straight line from one obligation to the next, gathering nothing along the way and arriving depleted.

This is the entire reason the practice exists. Chi that's given a chance to slow down and collect is what feng shui considers auspicious — it's the good fortune the whole discipline is built to invite and hold onto. A home that never lets anything settle can't accumulate that fortune long enough for it to compound, no matter how carefully it's decorated.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

This week's experiment: build one place to pause

Find the rushing. Stand just inside your front door and look straight ahead. If your eye travels uninterrupted to a back door, a window, or the end of a hallway, that's rushing chi in its plainest form. Walk the rest of the house at your ordinary pace, watching for the same pattern in miniature: any stretch where nothing catches the eye, any doorway that opens straight onto another exit.

Choose one. An entry table, a windowsill, a stretch of hallway wall, the corner of a landing. Start with whichever place you found first.

Build the vignette. Use three elements and no more: something with weight, like a stone, a bowl, or a heavy candle; something living or textured, like a single flower, a plant, or a folded cloth; and something that holds light, like a small mirror angled back into the room, or brass, or glass. Set them at slightly different heights so the eye has to travel.

Then actually use it. This is the part that matters and the part everyone skips. Once a day for one week, stop in front of it for the length of one full breath, not to meditate, just to look at it and let the momentum drop out of your body.

At the end of the week, notice whether the room feels different to move through, and whether you do.

P.S. — The second donkey

There is a parallel command elsewhere in the Torah, in Exodus, about a different donkey: the one belonging to someone who hates you. The sages compared the two cases and reached a conclusion that is easy to miss and hard to forget, which is that if you must choose between helping a friend and helping an enemy, you help the enemy first. It may, in their phrase, overcome the inclination, soften the hostility, and turn an enemy into something else.

P.P.S. — credit to one of my favorite entrepreneurs, Marie Forleo, who first pointed out to me how often we assume a lesson doesn't apply to us simply because we already know it.