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My son's swimmming coach and de facto Zen guru Marc Detraz tells him to "slow down to speed up" -- i.e. he's got to get more deliberate about his strokes if he wants to win any races.
I keep thinking of the mantra as I try to give myself sufficient time to heal before truly jumping back into things. After all, my husband is still home, helping with the kids, and work deadlines are mostly of my own choosing these days...but yesterday I found myself doing final edits on a very rushed story in the car while my spouse was driving us to swim practice, with both kids screaming and biting each other in the back. (Due to my cellphone conversation, we couldn't do our usual trick which is to put on a CD book on tape to hypnotize them.) I had to turn around in the midst of the conversation with the very patient editor (she has three kids of her own) and yell: "There Will Be Consequences!!!"
Ironically the story I was editing was about how mothers, more than most, summon compassion in our daily lives. You can read it in the LA Times op-ed section Sunday. Because I'm on a manic streak -- fueled probably by pure relief and joy at this point, since I've been off the post-op drugs for more than a week -- I also have an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section, on a vile Internet cartoon called Happy Tree Friends.