73 | Life’s Slip Roads, Rest Stops, and Bridges (Getting Up To and Down To Speed)

The Gentle Rebel Podcast

You’ve probably experienced tiring shifts when moving between tasks, environments, and social contexts—from work to home, solitary to social, and stress to calm.

In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I explore how slip roads, rest stops, and bridges can help us match the pace and rhythm (speeding up and slowing down) of situations and environments.

Oxford Services: The Meaning of Meaninglessness

Twenty years ago (😦), my friend Dave and I started a temporary tradition (three or four years) of meeting at Oxford Services on the M40 on New Year’s Eve. We drove there for a photo shoot, and Dave took the cover photo for The Final Scene (my first Atlum Schema album).

Without any practical reason, we decided to return the following year and drop a general invite to anyone who wanted to join us. A few people did. Then we did it again. Even more people showed up the year after. No one knew why we did it, but it became a playful, meaningless-yet-meaningful tradition. We would meet, have a coffee, chat, and then leave for our separate plans.

What I love about places like service stations is their “in-between” quality. They are not destinations but transient spaces—everyone is passing through. Like airports and train stations, they are filled with a unique type of energy because of this constant flow of people moving to different rhythms. I find them inspiring and exhausting.

Getting Up To Speed on Slip Roads

Slip roads allow vehicles to match the traffic speed of a busier road to merge onto it more smoothly. Transitions between tasks or environments can feel like changing roads. Sometimes, we’re expected (or expect ourselves) to jump into new situations at full speed, with no time to ease into the flow. These abrupt shifts can feel jarring for highly sensitive people, leaving little room to mentally or emotionally adjust.

This idea could help us consider the pressure we put on ourselves when moving between contexts. It can also give us some options for smoother transitions between different environments, situations, and activities.

Rest Stops and Kotas – Stopping to Pause

One of the things we do in The Return to Serenity Island is consider where to add rest stops and wilderness huts (kotas) around the map. These are not just spaces for physical rest, but they are places for soul-nourishing encounters with others. I think of these as fireside moments, times between “the action” when we transcend the busyness of doing and occupy a place of being, which can seem unproductive and inefficient use of time, especially when we have been trained to see everything as needing an obvious purpose.

Much like Oxford Services, it’s often the places that look devoid of purpose where meaning is made. It’s not the action but the pause that allows for transformation.

Bridges and Boundaries

These ideas build on my post about Bridging Our Boundaries, in which I discussed how boundaries sometimes need absorbent space to feel good rather than being hard starts and stops. These bridges provide space for preparation and recovery.

Deb Dana also uses the language of bridging to show how our nervous system moves between states. Rather than clicking our fingers to think our way back from stress to safety, seeing it as a journey back through and upwards to where we want to be is more valuable.

I also like using a map rather than a GPS to conceptualise personal development and progress. Growth is not about following one straight line up and to the right. Life is full of contours and landscapes to familiarise ourselves with and improve our navigation.

I finish this episode with an exercise from Anchored (Deb Dana) that explores the “stretch-stress continuum.” It resonates with what we do in The Return to Serenity Island. I hope it will be a practical tool you can use (if it resonates).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIlNkAfZQ6U&feature=youtu.be