One Resolution Is Enough: ‘I’ll Be the Tortoise’

Source: IStockphoto/Grandfailure

We’re curled up on the couch at the end of another long day, finally getting a little refuge from the relentless busyness of modern life. Then, the smartphone lights up, announcing itself yet again, calling us back to the churn.

Our phone has already buzzed, dinged, and flashed red dots 85 times today, the North American average (Andrews et al, 2015). Each interruption has carved away a sliver of our time; each glow has pulled us into a digital world.

Still, we draw the phone back into our hands, spot the familiar red dot, and open the text message from our friend: Free tomorrow evening? I’d love to get in a game of pickleball! It’s punctuated by a smiley face, a racket emoji, and a sparkle emoji that quietly insists this is a great idea.

We tap out a quick response, I’m in! And that’s when something both familiar and strange happens.

The Doorway Effect

We’d set out to enjoy a little quiet, but now, before we know it, we’re carried away by something called the doorway effect, an easy-to-understand, surprisingly relatable phenomenon (Radvansky et al, 2011).

To explain it, imagine this: We’re in our home office, emails open on our laptop, our fingers flying across the keyboard, our body grounded in our chair. Then our stomach growls, so we close the laptop and wander into the kitchen for a snack. And the moment we cross the doorway, the emails evaporate. They just disappear from our minds, erased like they never mattered, and we’re suddenly thinking all about snacks, drinks, and dinner plans.

Why? The reason is simple and deeply human. Our brain is wired to remember what we’re doing as long as the scene around us doesn’t change. But, change the setting, walk through a doorway, and, bam! The brain gleefully dumps the old focus to make room for whatever comes next.

And that’s how the trouble begins.

By the time we finish our short reply, confirming tomorrow’s pickleball game, the doorway effect has already taken hold: our mind has drifted off the couch, released its hope for stillness, and entered a digital world designed to keep us moving. Roblox waves from one corner. Facebook sparkles in another.

We tap Facebook and are greeted by a glossy ad assuring us that this pickleball racket, yes, this one, will unlock our potential and transform our game overnight. We click the ad, inspect the racket, and then a thought slips in quietly, innocently: I should probably polish my strokes. And that makes a YouTube tutorial seem like the obvious next step. And on it goes. The next thing we know, it’s far later than expected, and our peaceful evening has slipped away, spent inside a glowing world.

That’s the struggle in our modern world. It keeps asking us to be the Hare from The Tortoise and the Hare, always sprinting off to the next thing, taken in by the next distraction, calendars crammed, caffeine pumping through our veins. (de Graaf et al, 2001)

Buy this. Chase that. Scroll faster. Push harder, our culture chants, mistaking speed for living.

And in response, we begin to move at the pace our culture sets, fast, frantic, always reaching, and somewhere along the way, we lose the time of our lives.

And it’s okay.

This happens to all of us.

But.

Today is a new day.

Choosing the Tortoise

Let’s make one small, tender resolution: to take stillness by the hand and walk at a different pace, a calmer one, because the Hare was never our destiny. It isn’t who we are at our core. It’s just the role we were given by a culture that forgot how to breathe.

We were born to be the Tortoise. She isn’t behind; she’s taken a moment to take it all in. She feels the ground beneath her feet, hears what truly matters, and then steps forward with care, not speed. She knows the race was never the point. The point has always been traveling well.

Think of all the times the Tortoise’s stillness could have rescued us. There we were at the kitchen counter, a sharp edge in our voice when we told our spouse, Why do you always make things harder than they need to be? The words came from exhaustion, from moving too fast to breathe. If we’d allowed stillness to arrive, we could have quietly reminded ourselves: Wait just a moment longer before saying anything. And we could have paused, taken a deep breath, and the whole exchange would have taken a turn for the better.

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And think of all the tender moments the Tortoise’s stillness could have helped us catch and hold. There was the night our teenage son sat far too quietly at the dinner table, tracing circles through peas on his plate, his eyes drifting toward ours, waiting. And we said nothing. If we’d given stillness a chance to drift in, we might have remembered, Pay attention to this, and we could have met his gaze and answered it with: I’m right here. Tell me. What’s going on over there?

Finally, the Tortoise’s stillness could have helped us at the close of our day, when we were seated on the couch, ready for rest. With stillness by our side, we could have gently paused before picking up that phone. We might have murmured, later. Just not right now, stopping the doorway effect cold before it ever had a chance to begin, saving ourselves from spending another evening in a digital haze.

If you’re going to make a resolution this year, how about this one: Resolve to be the Tortoise, unhurried, deliberate, grounded. Add in a few simple breathing practices (McKeown, 2020) that let stillness walk in beside you, and you’ll reclaim the time of your life.