The Slower You Go, The Faster You Get There
The morning after is brutal. Fatigue. Foggy brain. That strange ache that could be muscle… or joints… or just existence catching up with you.
I’ve been in Chicago since Saturday at the Music Teachers National Conference. Five days of talking. Learning. Sharing. Celebrating. Catching up with old friends. Making new ones. Being in awe of the stories around me. Standing under the bright flash of new ideas and new connections and promising—we’ll stay in touch this time.
In my current role as Virginia state president, it also meant showing up consistently. Reports. Conversations. Watching what other states are building. Thinking hard about where we’re headed—especially around safe studio practices.
Five days. 6am wake-ups. 11pm bedtimes. (Ok—more like 1am. Netflix had to happen.)
I started strong. Water before coffee. Grilled chicken at lunch. Skip the dessert at dinner. By day three… Chicago deep dish pizza and a steady stream of black coffee took over. Also—there was this place called Eataly right next to the hotel that had insanely good chocolate. And air travel. Good lord. A bendy box of small spaces where you try to ignore the constant shifting chaos of humanity moving around you.
It was a good week. A full week. And this morning, I can feel it. I look in the mirror and my skin tells the whole story. Dry patches. Breakouts. A kind of dull gray that says—enough already.
So today, I made space for recovery. I started the day with water over coffee. I ran my fingers over the piano keys and played something just for me. I’ll spend a few hours this afternoon clearing winter debris from the garden. No students. No social plans.
And some close attention to my tired face. A full steam. Exfoliation. Now a hydromask for a little extra help. (For the record—Neutrogena Hydro Boost masks are excellent.)
Because I know this:
I need rest from the world—inside and out. If I keep moving at the pace of the last five days, this doesn’t get better. It compounds. What’s small becomes bigger. What’s manageable becomes overwhelming. What’s a little off becomes something harder to recover from.
There’s a teaching phrase commonly used in piano: The slower you go, the faster you get there.
It doesn’t often make sense to my students at first, and I get that. It didn’t make sense to me in the beginning either. Now it does. Because slowing down is how you actually learn something. It’s how you understand it. It’s how it settles into your body so you can carry it forward. And that’s true of more than music.
And you know what— this post isn’t really about skincare routines. Or closing the door for a day and catching up on laundry. Or even about oddly metaphoric teaching phrases. It’s about the space we refuse to take. The pause we skip because there’s more to do. The rest we delay because we think pushing through is the same thing as progress.
But it’s not.
You can see it on your face. You can feel it in your body. It manifests in your relationships.
Sometimes the way forward is slower than we want. Sometimes progress looks like stopping long enough to actually absorb where we’ve been. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do…
is stop.
Let things settle. Let the learning sink in. Let your system catch up. Let yourself recover before you ask for more.
I’m curious— are you good at building that space in… or do you tend to push straight through?
