Living At Jet Speed

A few weeks ago in Beijing a ticket for a concert I had been to three nights before in Paris slipped out of a book I was reading. I had completely forgotten I had attended. Frictionless life really means that: nothing sticks. Of course, there's a certain peace in holding onto your life with a kind of relaxed, disengaged grip. But the fact is that the constant movement strips away the best kinds of emotional connections. You can find moments of shocking intimacy as you move at this speed, but shock and intimacy aren't supposed to belong together. The first few times the sensation might be refreshing but after a while you worry that one of those words is slowly eating away the other, and it's not the word you would want to be winning.

This is largely why the high-speed life is not for everyone and it is not, even for me, forever. But there is, at least this: we live in a world where the most fundamental fact is constant change, an early arriving newness that greets us each day with surprises we couldn't have imagined. The great unpredictability of the last 20 years is both the most magnificent charm of modernity and its greatest terror. A high-velocity life harmonizes the constant movement of your life with the unstoppable change of our world. It is a kind of personal relativity, which means that even as everything around you shifts, you will retain the liberating ability to think, instead of only reacting. There is another gift too. Those late nights in the snow in St. Petersburg, the early sunsets in Paris? That panorama of esthetic pleasure you encounter in the fast life seems to me now the best insulation against that horrible, final jolt when we will, all of us, be slowed down to the speed we will endure for the rest of time.

Ramo is managing director of Kissinger Associates.

© 2006