It’s dark outside. The train is fast and quiet. It only stops at the major stations. It covers a lot of ground in a short time. In contrast, the train to connect with this one stopped more often and took a comparatively long time to cover a short distance. It also wasn’t anything like as smooth.
We’re travelling back from a workshop in Manchester with author and speaker Marianne Williamson – very well done it was too.
Marianne made one point in particular about the level we choose to work at as we go about our daily lives…
“If we work at the shallow level, time will go fast and we will struggle to get everything done; if we work at the deep level, time will go more slowly and we will have plenty of opportunity to do what we need to do.”
Marianne was making a general remark, but of course it applies to relationships with other people…
We have a choice: We can scratch about on the surface and take forever to get something done as we wade through the myriad of details we must discuss to get a result, or we can connect with someone at a deeper level and know then that the details will be taken care of because we have an understanding at a much more profound level.
We tend to shy away from the “deep” stuff – some of us might even “roll our eyes,” but we may be avoiding the very thing that would take us where we want to go more quickly, more easily, more safely and with more lasting results, like the express train.
Of course, we may need to take the “slow train” of a shallow approach to begin the journey and connect in the first place, and perhaps another one to get to our final destination – as we agree the details of what specifically is to happen perhaps – but to cover the big distances in a relationship, we might prefer to go deeper and take the express for as much of the journey as we can.