A Sensible Pace

Where did we lose our sensible pace? This was my first day sterning, decades ago, helping a lobsterman empty traps, band claws, and move to the next buoy. February, bundled up tight, seawater got over my boot’s brim as I grabbed the dory and climbed in. Sometimes, you have to stop, reset.

Lewis Caroll, the wit who wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, gave us lots to think about. One idea: “Whatever is worth doing … is worth doing well.” Sometimes we forget.

How often these days does the world rush us along? We feel compelled to make a quick response on social media to the latest news, grab this or that headed here or there, make promises we mean to fulfil, wish to, but never do.

The 24-hour news cycle was – 40 years ago – one hour. We felt content, well-informed, not spun up. Today, if we have not had our fill of blood, sweat, and government debt, rank indignation, twisted information, and a new outrage on the world stage, things just feel incomplete.

But are they? Or are we missing the forest for the windmills, tricked into thinking everything is an emergency, the world is close to ending, that we must be plugged in, fast as a rabbit, crisis a habit?

Some days, as I journey about this state, concerned for our common fate, I pull the reins back, give myself added slack, and think about those who came before us, what they might say in chorus.

They would say, I think, what is your hurry? Are you moving so fast you are missing the point, caught up in the circus, emoting by rote, forgetting your purpose? Isn’t it your place to set your pace?

They might quote Carroll back at me, straight out of Alice, our world “curiouser and curiouser,” people so confused they speak before they know, unsure of where to go. As Carroll wrote, “If you don’t know where you are going … any road will get you there.” Or maybe not.

Elsewhere, he wrote, in his delightful way, “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get,” and maybe – for now – that is the point. As the world’s pace speeds, is that the goal? To what end, at what cost, what in that speed-along-process have we lost?

Looking backward, I wonder how those who preceded us – from Genesis and Romans to our Founding Fathers – would view the absurdities that now pass for normal, the social nonsense and unchecked power. What would they say of this modern Babel, this wobbly tower?

They might, as the poet Ovid did, advising his son on untamed horses, say: “Your art must be to moderate their haste.” Confronting today’s preoccupation with power, his advice fits this hour.

In any event, remembering how we used to do things, including that winter day when I soaked my sock boarding the dory, I recall the lobsterman’s quiet advice. “Take your time, change that sock, too cold to go out wet…I’ll be right here, go off and get set.” Where did we lose our sensible pace?

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!