Slow Hiking for a Fast Mind (Rachel’s Version)

My first big fight with Kim was about me moving too fast. I invited Kim with me to Nashville, Tennessee for a week where I was attending a program to become a certified facilitator of Crucial Conversations*. Our fight was such a blow out that I used it in every single future class I taught after that as an example of how not to have a Crucial Conversation. Showing the students that even the teacher is bad at having hard conversations always made everyone breathe a sigh of relief. Since they knew my reputation for being very skilled at having tough discussions, it made them feel like there was hope for them too.

That’s why I’m telling you about my first big fight with Kim. When it comes to slowing down in life, I’m still learning, which means there is also hope for you.

Our fight went a little something like this.

Scene: Kim had been exploring Nashville all day while Rachel sat for 8 hours in a class discussing in great detail every emotion she has ever experienced during a difficult conversation. Kim who has been having fun but has also been feeling a little lonely was very excited to show Rachel all the neat things she discovered. Rachel was emotionally exhausted and physically sore from sitting all day.

Kim: Hey honey. Would you slow down please? I really want to enjoy this with you.

Rachel: DON’T YOU TRY TO CONTROL ME!

Now I don’t know if you’ve met a McKenzie before, but they are not exactly known for their cool and gentle tempers. Conversely, Thompsons are not exactly known for apologizing if they don’t feel like it and instead prefer to hit you with their stone-cold, deadly silence.

I am confident you can imagine how the rest of this “dialogue” went. Just to summarize, we were the evening entertainment for every other person within earshot.

But I did take something away from that argument besides an amazing example of how not to handle a difficult conversation. I realized that I had something to learn about slowing down.

I have always been observant and curious about the world around me, both in cities and in nature. But while my eyeballs were seeing, my mind was always frantically busy. Yes, I could physically make my body slow down, but I allowed my mind to race with ideas, imaginations, and assessments. Moving slowly caused a sort of incongruent disconnection between my body and mind, and I would feel my anxiety rising.

When it came to nature, I was treating it like a commodity, as if all these things I was seeing were mine to consume. As if I was something set apart from and superior to it. As if the primary purpose of nature was what it did for me.

In conversation, the objective should always be to build connection, and that’s why hard discussions are so important to have. When difficult things are left unsaid, trust breaks down. But building connection means that you really have to put effort into listening more than you talk. As Crucial Conversations teaches, we need to listen to understand, not listen to respond. And that involves slowing our minds way down.

Slowing down is hard. It takes a lot of practice, just like having a difficult discussion. It tends to put our anxiety right in front of our eyeballs. And let me tell you from experience, anxiety is an emotion that does not like to relinquish its hold on our lives. When we slow down our bodies, we will hear all the noise in our minds, and that’s scary. But with practice, our minds will quiet down a bit and become more open to simply being with the natural world.

The point is connection. The point is listening to understand.

If we listen, our desire to center ourselves in the universe will shift to a recognition that we are a small piece of something beautiful and grand. A vibrant and resplendent world means that we are vibrant and resplendent too. We are not distinct from the world but connected to it.

That’s what Kim was trying to tell me in our first fight when she asked me to slow down. She was asking me to let go of the self-involved working of my mind and connect to her in that moment.

Kim and I went back to Nashville a few years later, and we went slowly on foot to connect to the city around us. At each intersection, we turned whichever direction the crosswalk lights told us we could go. We ended up in the real neighborhoods of Nashville far off Broadway. Sometimes we got a little anxious and lost our way. But when we connected to the people and places that were right in front of our faces, we knew where we were. We were right here.

It is hard to slow the mind down and listen to understand. But let me provide you with some hope. I am still learning. I am right here.

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*Crucial Conversations is a very helpful program (and book and video shorts) to help individuals to have productive conversations when emotions are running high. For more information about Crucial Conversations and their other helpful courses, visit Crucial Learning | Courses, Certifications, Team Training

For Kim’s version of “Slow Hiking for a Fast Mind,” see her original blog posted on July 1, 2025.