The shed next to the restored sawmill had a grindstone in it--a wheel of finely cut stone, mounted in a wooden frame and turned by a handle. People in the last century (which is what the historical village we were touring was presenting) used tools like this to put an edge on knives, scythes, and axes. My kid John and his friends were taking turns turning the crank as fast as they could, spinning the wheel at high speed. I was watching them and making jokes (not very successful) about noses and grindstones.

I hadn't noticed the straight-backed elderly gentleman who had come up behind our group. He said, gently and ruminatively, almost more to himself than to us: In the old days, all these machines were meant to work at 60 turns a minute. Grindstones, milk separators – you were meant to turn them once per second, not too fast, not too slow. It let you get the work done. He showed us, turning an imaginary crank with a strong, slow, steady beat.

I talked about this a little with him, and when I thought of it, it made sense. In our aerobics classes, we're used to pushing it to the max, working flat out in short bursts of energy that leave us exhausted – but this isn't our real work. Our real work has us sitting down at computers, sedentary.

The work this man remembered, the work this village represented, was unremitting hard physical labour. You can't do that lickety-split. Muscles doing hard physical labour need enough oxygen; otherwise, they build up lactic acid and other toxic byproducts of anaerobic metabolism: painful and ultimately damaging. You can get away with that for 15 minutes in your fitness class. You can't get away with it working from dawn to dusk in hay season on a 19th-century farm. There, you have to operate at a level of intensity that you can sustain over the long term. And that means working steadily, but not too quickly: 60 beats per minute. You can work far longer that way, and get more done, than if you really push yourself for brief exhausting bursts.

Maybe working flat-out is one of those privilege things. Up till this century, being pale-skinned was a statement that you didn't need to work in the sun, and so pale skin was valued, because it meant you were a Privileged Person. Then work moved indoor and turned pale and pasty, and having a tan was a statement that you could afford to lie around in the sun, and that meant you were a Privileged Person. In other cultures and times, having lots of rounded fleshy padding was a statement that you were well-fed and therefore a PP. In this culture and time, being lean and muscular and flat-bellied says that you don't have to worry where your meals are coming for and you have enough the time, money, and self-love to train at the gym; and therefore you are a PP. Working very hard for short bursts says that you don't have to do this all the time: it is to real physical labour as Marie Antoinette's Trianon was to this last-century Upper Canadian farm.

Where we do work flat-out is in trying to meet deadlines, to please clients, to keep up with the competition. And in that world of mind-work, we all too often work at far more than 60 beats a minute--and demand the same of others around us, because the client wants it the day-before-yesterday. We create a sort of corporate myth that working at blinding speed for prolonged periods is an index to an employee's dedication and professionalism. And then we burn out, or succumb to addictions, or find that all our good people are leaving the firm.... It doesn't occur to us that the work of the mind, like the work of the body, has to be paced at a humane rate, or there will be inevitable consequences.

I was thinking about all this, and it did occur to me that, at least for me, doing the Journey in Faith isn't a matter of the hundred-metre dash. It's more like being a pilgrim on the way to Compostella: a long walk, one that sometimes seems endless: pack on your back, putting one foot in front of another for many dusty miles. It's far too great a distance to race through--and if you race, you miss so much of the company and the landscape... Sometimes it feels like you're a bug crawling across a very large tabletop and your progress seems imperceptible. But then, some blessed times, you find a place to rest and be thankful, and you look back over your shoulder and truly see how far you've come.

Faith's for the long haul. Maybe this is why strenuous, muscularly vehement devotions are something that wise people of faith have always been rather chary about: is this truly faith, or is it just a form of showing off, proving how special I am? After all, people who are doing the real work of community and love and all that – the long-haul stuff – have had to learn to pace themselves: 60 beats per minute, not (apologies to St. Paul!) a mad sprinting for the goalpost.

People who are doing the real work of love know that it does take time, man's time and God's time; and that you can't hurry the process. Exhausting yourself isn't love; it's vanity: "look how loving I can be!" You have to get on with it steadily, neither exhausting yourself nor slacking off: 60 beats a minute. The rate of the healthy beating human heart.

In the days after our visit to the historical village, I found myself slowing up, looking around at the possibility of pacing life more slowly, more steadily – less of this flying around in a violent hurry, more of methodically tackling tasks over the longer run. He was right, the old gentleman: I get more done this way.