Although I was too young to recall much about the Cuban missile crisis, I vaguely remember being led into the long linoleum tiled hallway of Jane Addams Elementary in the 1960s for different kinds of “drills.”

When I went to grade school, likely threats were assumed to come from natural disasters or from Russia, not from that kind of weird classmate getting a gun from his parents and acting out some sort of revenge fantasy.

Not requiring safety drills but a shock I had to get used to, I recall hearing “sonic booms” during those years.

Basically, a “sonic boom” is a jarring explosion-like sound that occurs when an object travels through the air faster than the speed of sound. “Supersonic transports,” airplanes capable of Mach One speeds (761 mph), were tested often, flying over nearby airfields, during the 60s.

The concept of something traveling faster than the speed of sound was heady for me as a ten-year-old, but the sonic boom phenomenon made the idea a little easier to accept. The concept of light traveling at 186,000 miles per second was much harder for me to wrap my head around.

Our culture is obsessed with speed. Well-attended auto shows promise sneak peaks at new SUVs that can accelerate quicker than it takes to dissolve a packet of Starbuck’s Instant coffee.

It’s standard operating procedure for Internet providers to get new customers to sign up for their latest “bundle” by touting their download speeds (and not explaining how all bets are off if you live close to an airport).

People seem to judge everything by how fast it can be done or by how fast it can be checked off a list.

We have to-do lists, top ten lists, reading lists and bucket lists. That’s probably one of the few times we permit ourselves to talk about death — when we think about what we want to  accomplish before we die.

I have been attending a workshop recently where group members are different ages. I can see the “need for speed” is even more important to younger people.

A very enthusiastic young woman in this group was touting the virtues of a new kitchen appliance she recently started using. She explained that all you have to do to make a perfectly flakey fish dinner was press a button (assuming a person has the sense to take the fish out of its wrapper first).

I was a little appalled.

I understand that we don’t always have the luxury of time for preparing an elaborate home-cooked meal, but choosing not to experience the joy of experimentation in the kitchen or share a meal with someone you love AFTER making it specifically to suit their tastes feels like cutting out a certain type of joy from your menu of everyday pleasures.

I understand that not everybody is into cooking as a form of creative expression and many adults grew up with parents who shamed them into thinking that eating something they made is required to demonstrate love. Still, I hate to think that home-cooked meals that come out of a box and need only a push of the button has become the norm.

If people only want to press a button or buy an app to do something, we can miss so much of the experience. We can even reduce the richness and complexity of our life’s stories. We have less to talk about and share with others.

Most people develop their own approaches to making a tasty salmon fillet, but we all push a button the same way.

Like many others, I have become attuned to watching TV coverage of the weather. Weather is an interesting lens through which we can see ourselves, the importance we place on predictability and our eventual acceptance that there are some things we can’t control.

I’ve noticed how frigid temps followed by quick warm-ups increase all aorts of dangers, from  flash-flooding to the formation of potholes.

Change and adjustments are natural, but when changes happen too quickly, new problems can be created.

These days, I’m not concerned with the speed of light so much as with the speed of life.

People are often preoccupied with checking things off lists, like it’s proof of using time well, but life itself is not synchronized to this kind of clock.

It’s not how quickly we do something, or reach a goal, but how much we want to linger over our experiences that’s no small thing.