Be kind, just rewind. Lessons on Going Slow in a Fast-Paced World. A mini essay by me, Morgan Harper-Nichols.

Back in the day, there was a place called Blockbuster. This is a place where we used to go and rent

home movies that we could put into these things called VCRs that would play the movies that we rented

from Blockbuster. And on the actual videotape of every single one of these rentals was this

sticker that said something like, be kind, just rewind. This was a reminder that after you finish

your movie, before you get ready to return it,

please rewind it so the person after you can watch the movie from the beginning.

As a kid, I was pretty serious about this, and I remember always checking to make sure the tapes were fully

rewinded before we took them back to

Blockbuster and returned them via the little return box outside the store. And years later, I am

obviously not renting VHS movies anymore from a home movie rental store. And we as a society are largely very far removed from having

to rewind a movie to watch it again. However, one thing that I find to be so interesting about this

concept of having spent so many years rewinding movies so someone else could watch them, is that it's like

it's this visual reminder of something that we forget to do in life, and that is to rewind to the

beginning so someone else can experience it. Rewind to the beginning so someone else can experience it. Be kind and just rewind was

of course a slogan to encourage you to literally rewind the movie for the next person. And also,

if we take a little bit of poetic license here, it can also be a reminder that when it comes to sharing

our stories with others, we need to rewind to the beginning before we share it. We live in a time

where information and stories come in so fast in such a fragmented way. People go viral every day for something that happened in

their life in a 15 second time span. We aren't getting the full story. We're getting so many things

out of context. We don't have the opportunity to rewind as near as much as we need to, to see all the

things that led up to that moment. In many ways, I feel like the shorter and shorter content gets

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