Slowpoke,

Slowpoke by Crosby Stills Nash and Young.

There’s a line in Neil Young’s Slowpoke that I keep returning to, one that seems to shift shape each time I hear it:
“When I was faster, I was always behind.”

It feels less like a lyric and more like a confession — or a reckoning. Those few words hold the quiet clarity of someone who has spent years caught in the noise of motion and finally realized that speed doesn’t mean progress. It’s a line that slows you down the moment you hear it, because deep inside, you recognize its truth: the faster we move, the less we seem to arrive.

I’ve been thinking about this idea of pace — how much of our lives are spent trying to match the rhythm of a world that rarely stops to breathe. There’s always a demand to keep up, to grow, to adapt, to be seen. Yet somewhere between the rush and the reach, we begin to lose our own sense of time. We start measuring ourselves by how quickly we respond, how efficiently we move, how soon we deliver. But life, like art, doesn’t unfold on command. It ripens in its own time, quietly, stubbornly.

That’s what I hear in Slowpoke: a reminder that not all delay is hesitation. Sometimes it’s integrity — the simple act of refusing to move at a borrowed rhythm. Neil’s voice carries that kind of stillness; his phrasing feels deliberate, as if every pause is a way of reclaiming space from the noise outside. The song itself ambles forward without hurry, teaching by example that there’s strength in restraint, in knowing when not to rush.

It takes courage to move at your own pace in a world built on acceleration. To say: I’ll take the time I need. To trust that the work, the love, the understanding — whatever it is you’re shaping — will find its form when it’s ready, not when it’s demanded. That’s a quiet act of rebellion, and perhaps, the truest form of freedom.

I’ve learned a lot about this from my daughters. Their sense of time is still unbroken — elastic, full of wonder. They linger. They stop to look, to ask, to notice what I’ve trained myself to pass by. With them, I’ve begun to understand that the point is not to arrive but to be there while arriving. To live in the unfinished, to give things the space to grow.

And perhaps that’s the hidden promise inside Slowpoke: that slowing down isn’t giving up, it’s catching up — not with the world, but with yourself. The moment you stop chasing, something within you aligns; you begin to move with the grain of your own life rather than against it. You start to see that what looks like delay from the outside is often devotion from within.

We each have a rhythm that’s ours alone. It can’t be replicated or forced, only listened to — a pulse beneath everything we do. The task, I think, is to protect it. To keep it alive even when the world around us insists on urgency. To trust that there is meaning in moving slowly, in giving time to what deserves it.

Slowpoke ends without resolve — it just fades, like a road that keeps going beyond the horizon. Maybe that’s the point. There’s no grand arrival, no revelation waiting at the end. Just the steady truth that life itself is not something to be won, but witnessed — at one’s own pace, in one’s own time.