Generally speaking, I am not a reader of self-help books. However, Slowing Down to the Speed of Joy was a gift from a special woman. You see, Gentle Reader, my second granddaughter was being christened on a warm autumn day, and one of my guardian angels (one of “the” Kathys that I wrote about here) was in attendance. She was there praying with us for this new life who was being welcomed into the Catholic community. It was a very special day, indeed.

After Mass and Baby Sister’s baptism, we shared coffee, cake, and camaraderie with family and friends. Before Kathy left, she handed me this book by Matthew Kelly. I had read Holy Moments years ago and knew that I should read this one, especially if Kathy recommended it.

Read it, I did, on a transnational flight, which in this day and age is rarely a comfortable experience, even in the best of circumstances. But on that flight, I learned that “slowing down” is not my real problem. Finding joy is.

We are assaulted each day, sometimes each moment, by negative energy, evil people, and we live in a century that regales us with “artificial” intelligence, as though “fake” is a good thing. Kelly notes something that Henry David Thoreau said a couple of hundred years ago in Walden, so his premise is not new. “We seem willing to trade our time for money so we can buy more stuff that we don’t need.” Ah, thank goodness Henry had idea how much worse it would get. Frittering, frittering, frittering at the speed of light.

I do not live in 1830. I live in 2025. I have always felt that I exist in the wrong century, yet working too much and frittering my life away is not a problem that I have. Kelly clearly defines my sort of problem: “We have to live in the world as it is, not as we wish it were.” Which century I was born into really isn’t the problem. The world as it is, is. Sheesh. I really wanted what was wrong in the world to be due to this artificial century. That would have made it so simple.

So what do I do with that realism? Kelly makes it perfectly clear – Live the mandate!

The mandate is clear. Love is the mandate. But not just any kind of love. Not a love open to
interpretation. No. The mandate is clear. Wholehearted love is the mandate. Love with all your
heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. Wholehearted love (39).

And from where does he get this mandate? Matthew 22:37-39.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your
neighbor as yourself (39).

This mandate leaves no room for doubt as to how to make the world function as it should. What reduces our capacity for wholehearted love? Focusing on the wrong things. Those things become more important than people, than loving people. To love a person is the reason. For everything. For everything that is right and good and beautiful in this world. People are not an interruption to one’s goals. They are the reason for the (righteous) goals.

What is right and good? Kelly explains that we must recognize and know what is real. “Knowing what is real is central to living a meaningful, deeply fulfilling, and truthful life. Our current culture’s unwillingness to differentiate between what is true and false, right and wrong, good and evil, makes it increasingly impossible for people to live happy, meaningful, and deeply satisfying lives”  (93). And therein lies the answer. So simple, yet so elusive.

As for Kathy, I must tell you that she didn’t need to read this book because all of this “busy-ness” doesn’t really apply to her. Yes, she is probably the busiest person I know. But whatever she does, she does with purpose and a noble goal. She knows how to shower the world and its people with as much good as she can without becoming lost in her deeds. She does not do things haphazardly or halfheartedly, yet she is not frazzled. With her example and Kelly’s playbook, I should be all right. I’m working on it.

Note to Gentle Readers: I do NOT use artificial intelligence to generate anything. These words come from my head, and all of my photographs come from my camera or are borrowed from other humans who photographed the pictures themselves (with full credit given to any human whose work I use on this website). Words and art are sacred and uniquely human and should be treated as such. That’s my two cents.