When I was little, we would often build different contraptions that would carry us down the big hills nearby: carts, skateboards, trolleys…
Inevitably, some of these things go pretty unstable at higher speeds. I remember one time sitting on a modified skateboard flying down the hill near our house.
The speed wobbles hit, and then off I came. Huge grazes down by leg.
Overwhelm and stress seems to often hit us like the speed wobbles. Things move faster, until there’s some instability in the whole thing that starts to show up out of nowhere.
On a skateboard at speed, the laws of physics are against us here. Once the speed wobbles hit, usually we have to go through the crash.
Thankfully, on the day-to-day, we usually have some choices:
- We can choose to slow it down. What does it look like to take the foot off of the accelerator for a second?
- We can write it down. What is our narrative here? What are we feeling? What’s actually happening? Can we write this out as a few words?
- We can break it down. If I were to write out a few steps that I know could help me here, what might they be? Who could I reach out to? Who is around me? How can we break it down?
Speed wobbles often come out of nowhere. The question is what do we want to do with them when they hit?
