Stopping is not slowing down. There are many books on slowing down the frantic pace of life. This is not one of them, even though an important aspect of Stopping?even one of the reasons for Stopping?is, in fact, to slow down. The process of Stopping is very different from the process of slowing down. Trying to slow down does not slow you down. We have been trying to do that for many years now; it generally doesn't work. It's like trying to cut down on smoking: in a short time you end up where you started, except more frustrated.

Slowing down doesn't work because everything around us is going so fast. We get revved-up even if we don't want to be. In his book Timeshifting, Stephan Rechtschaffen, MD, writes about entrainment, which he describes as an unconscious “process that governs how various rhythms fall into sync with one another.” For example, if you were to place two out-of-sync pendulum clocks next to one another, in a short time they would be exactly in sync. “The same principle works,” says Rechtschaffen, “with atomic particles, the tides and human beings.” With human beings? That's quite a remarkable idea. We pick up each other's rhythms and the accumulated rhythms of the world around us. If most of the rhythms around us are fast, so are ours, automatically. That's entrainment. The word can also mean “getting on a train.”

Stopping can bring us both an answer and a solution.