My Uber to Union Station in Washington DC this morning took twice as long as it often does, the traffic heavy as everyone returns from summer breaks. Crawling across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, bumper to bumper with hundreds of other commuters, I couldn’t help but glance at my watch a few times to double-check I’d have time to grab coffee before boarding my train for back to back client meetings in NYC. (Fortunately, I did!)

After a week away by the water, that drive felt like I was suddenly jolted back into the fast lane—or at least, the lane that’s desperately trying to be fast.

As I sit on this Amtrak train now, I can’t help but contrast my view with what I looked at just three weeks ago while traveling across Australia by train with my 90 year old dad, watching the vast sunburnt landscape roll past as we traveled from the south to the ‘Top End.’

We’re trying to run modern software on ancient hardware.

Dad has slowed down a lot in in the last year and now relies on a walking stick. Forced to match his slower pace, I noticed how slowly down physically helped me slow down mentally. Over the course of a few days, his walking stick tapping a gentler rhythm against the parched earth, I observed a calmness permeate throughout my entire being. It reminded me of a factoid I came across while writing The Courage Gap. That our brains are wired much the same as they were 65,000 years ago, yet we’re living in an age where life comes at us faster than our nervous systems were designed to handle.

We’re essentially trying to run modern software on ancient hardware, and it’s showing. The stats tell the story: rising anxiety and depression, attention spans that have shrunk from 12 to 8 seconds over just 25 years.

Yes, eight seconds—shorter than a goldfish!

But what if the extra pressure we feel to do more and move faster isn’t actually a problem to solve, but an invitation to evolve?

Think of it like the Woodrow Wilson Bridge bridge I crossed this morning. When traffic exceeds a bridge’s capacity as I did on my commute this morning, everything slows to a crawl. Like every bridge, it can handle a certain volume, but overload it and everyone suffers, regardless of how urgently they need to get somewhere.

The same happens when outer demands exceed your inner resources. But unlike a physical bridge, we humans have have agency to expand our inner bandwidth—to hold complexity, navigate uncertainty, and respond with wisdom rather than reactivity. But we have to be intentional about it.

It’s what I call closing ‘the courage gap’—that space between knowing what serves us and actually doing it, particularly when our fears are urging us to speed up lest we get left behind.

Choosing to slow down your ‘doing’ and reconnect to your being isn’t passivity, it’s courage. It’s also the wisest thing you can do.

Your nervous system is called a nervous system for a reason. Its default is self-protective vigilance. This includes speeding up under pressure. It’s why choosing to slow down or take some time to pause and be still isn’t passivity but an act of courage. And having the courage to pause, to breath, and to ground yourself before rushing headlong into the next thing can help you see that the most important thing to do is often s the thing you feel pressured to do.

Your fear will try to convince you that slowing down risks left behind.  Yet it actually does the opposite, expanding your bandwidth to prioritize more effectively, to solve problems better and discern which ones aren’t yours to solve.

Navigating your path through a world whose foot seems stuck on the accelerator doesn’t require you to control the chaos and uncertainty. (Good luck trying though!) Rather, it calls on you to live more spaciously within it – kinder to yourself in moments of overwhelm, intentional in nurturing your nervous system so you can expand your capacity to hold what needs to be held and to discern what isn’t yours to hold in the first place.

So as you move through your day today – on a train, behind a wheel or on foot – simply notice the pressure you are feeling to speed up. Feel it in your body when you’re rushing between meetings, checking your phone while walking, or mentally calculating whether you can shave off a few minutes.

Don’t let a false sense of urgency outrun your wisdom. Rather, allow yourself to be informed by life rather than bulldozing mindlessly through it.

And then…

Deliberately choose to move through your day at the pace of wisdom, not urgency.

How we move in the world is who we are in the world. By moving with presence —pausing before responding to that “urgent” email, taking three deep breaths before entering a difficult conversation, walking with intention, not Road Runner pace—you empower yourself to be informed by life rather than bulldozing mindlessly through it.

As I experienced both in the Outback as I did on Woodrow Wilson Bridge, sometimes the slower route is the most direct path to where you actually need to go.