I need everything to slow down. Please. Everything is a blur.

Don’t worry. I’m not experiencing a quarter life crisis or anything dramatic like that. But lately I’ve been feeling as though I’m standing still in the median of the highway of my life, with feelings and experiences and emotions and traffic whizzing past me on either side in six lanes of exhaust and horns at speeds upwards of 90 miles an hour. If only I were big enough and strong enough to and brave enough to take one small step to my right and stand in front of the oncoming actuality and stop it dead in its tracks for only a day. Maybe just a moment. Just long enough to completely savor it.

Bringing it back to the backbone of this blog, I blame it on my job. News is only “new” just long enough for another story to break and then another and then another. And before you know it, last week feels like last year and last year feels like five years ago and five years ago feels impossible. It’s one of the only jobs I know of where your workday never begins because the last one never ended. Yes, you leave the newsroom at the end of the day (and week.) But that doesn’t stop the world from turning, people from living, and news from consequently breaking. So when you next set foot inside the newsroom, you hit the ground running even before you put your purse down, and it is only a matter of minutes before you’re up to your elbows in the happenings of the world. All of a sudden you find that your own experiences, the news breaking in your world, takes a backseat to the Olympics and Michael Jackson’s doctor and H1N1 and budget cuts and snow days and meth busts and dead bodies and murder trials.

Today, it all slowed down. For just a moment, I was able to block off the rush hour traffic on life’s six lane highway and transport into my own no-cars-allowed-sidewalk-only microcosm. It was the closest thing to a vacation I’ve had since my honeymoon, and it was only breakfast.

I’ve only ever gotten to hang out with baby Kylin in the evenings when she’s fussy, so to remedy that Dan and I woke up a bit earlier than normal (for a Saturday morning, that is; we still slept in as far as weekly wake up calls go) and went over to Ashley’s and brought pancake mix and eggs. We weren’t there but five minutes before I got a smile out of Kylin’s sweet face. Kathleen, Jeff, and little Jackson met us a few minutes later bearing bagels and bacon, and all of us sat around and ate like kings and drank unholy amounts of coffee and talked and experienced each other for hours in the most beautiful way. We laughed, we gasped, we admired the little ones, we comfortably co-existed without anxiety. We had nowhere to be, and no distractions (no news stories) were tugging at me. I left my BlackBerry out of reach on silent, letting each work email quietly go unnoticed, and sat back to delight in the safe little world we’d created inside that warm apartment, completely devoid of darkness and bursting with light and love.

Tomorrow is Sunday. As a pastor’s wife and ministry leader, I can already hear the engines revving in the distance. My lungs are already choking for fresh air, as I stare blankly, sadly, into another blurred six days.

Just. One. More. Moment. Please. One more smile from Kylin, one more cup of coffee, one more Jeff/Jackson body slam, one more minute to sink deeper into my husband’s arms. Please. Just one.