Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand. Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scale ups, in-person, and on the go. Shopify's made for

entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.

I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

Putting away the dishes one morning, first light blazing up the kitchen, I said to the fork,

I love you, fork. Then I said it again to the spoons, and then to the slowdown mug,

and to every item lifted from the dishwasher. My walk that morning brought forth the world in technicolor.

Piercing green trees.

A blue sky screeching loud as a free jazz concert.

A joggers passing smile, soft, otherworldly.

The earth hummed and throbbed. At a stoplight, I was suddenly filled with

an inexplicable joy. My day of explosive happiness was counterintuitive. My inner world was

actually gray. A family member has been battling cancer. Another, a victim of

hurricanes. And then there was myself. Ever negotiating the psychic demands of being present in a world

where kindness fills in short supply.

But as the speaker in today's poem acknowledges,

living is tough work, but live we must.

We must live extravagantly with purpose and meaning.

On Living by Nazim Hegman.

One, living is no laughing matter.

You must live with great seriousness, like a squirrel, for example. I mean, without looking for something beyond and above living. I mean, living must be your whole occupation.

Living is no laughing matter. You must take it seriously, so much so and to such a degree that,

for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall, or else in the laboratory,

...