When you face a personal crisis, one of the first pieces of advice of any personal health expert will be to tell you that you need to is slow down. You need to simplify things. The best way to organize, or re-organize, your life is to simply slow down.
That kind of wisdom goes back thousands of years. It usually take either an expert or a person who is experienced to see that the best way to solve a problem is to slow down, to analyze the problem, and then to tackle it slowly. This allows one to think better. This allows one to see the whole picture.
A great example of this is landing an airplane, or so I hear.. If you are landing a plane and meet resistance, or a draft, what happens next is determined by the action of the pilot. A natural instinct of an amateur is to speed up. They think that by going faster this will allow them to get through the problem.
Yet what happens is he meets more resistance. The ride gets very bumpy. The problem gets worse.
The expert pilot, or the pilot with experience, will know that the best way to respond to a situation like this is to slow down. You slow down and you glide right in and the solution is easy. You land and end of story.
When you or I start to feel a financial pinch, we slow down. We spend less. We try to get our finances under control. This is what we must do or we will fail. We will have to file for bankruptcy. When our lives get stressful, we don't tack on more tasks: we slow down. If we speed up we go bonkers.
Those in Washington are another good example. Washington in recent years is run by amateurs. Most are career politicians. Most have never worked in the private sector. They see a problem and they want to solve it by spending more and creating more programs. They don't get it.
They don't see that by speeding up in this way they are just creating more friction. They are making the problem worse. In the late 1800s Grover Cleveland was asked to speed up during a recession, and instead he refused. He said something like, "When times are tough we must slow down, not speed up.'
Yet Cleveland was a wise man of the working class before he became President. He understood how to solve problems. He understood the importance of slowing down. Within a year the economy had improved. He stood on the sidelines, did nothing, slowed down, and that was it. Problem solved.
That's how resistance was treated on the national level back in the 1800s. Washington slowed down in the face of adversity. While there were many recessions and depressions in the 19th century, they were only 1-3 years max.
Yet now that our leaders are career politicians instead of working class people who understand how to solve problems by slowing down, they don't know how to lead. A good example here is FDR and Hoover. Instead of slowing down in the face of adversity they sped up. They spent and they created and the Great Depression went on and on and on.
The same is happening today. Instead of George Bush and Obama slowing down, they sped up. The problems of this nation did not get better. The recession lingers on. They do not understand the importance of slowing down; of getting out of the way; of looking at the big picture.
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