Slowly

In real life I move slowly.

In my career, I work hard and quickly. I am a fast editor. My mind solves problems and implements solutions with reasonably fast speed. I remain more ahead of schedule than behind it.

But in real life, I move slowly.

I am slow to make friends. I dawdle about that weird pain in my side. The recycling piles up for a few too many days. Great plans never get any further than the planning stage.

When I was in grade school—I was probably only eight or nine years old—the classroom had these binders of illustrated stories. They were comic book style, only a few pages long. I fixated on one of these stories reading it over and over. I remember it being monochromatic, brown-and-white.

Astronauts explored a distant world. They discovered two giant, humanoid statues. (Or, were they archaeologists in some distant corner of our world? The details are a bit fuzzy.) They chiseled a chunk of stone from the foot of one statue for testing. They left the planet and returned home with their specimen.

Many years later, they returned to find the statues had moved! One reached toward its foot. Its face showed pain. The other comforted its friend.

I read that story countless times. How different must the lives of the statue-people be from lives of the astronauts? Probably not very different, until forced to interact.