Somewhere along the way, we decided that having a sense of urgency is a virtue. If you don’t have urgency, you’re lazy. Am I right?
And since we can’t create all of it ourselves, it’s easy to run on other people’s urgencies. We stop telling the difference between theirs and ours. Notifications and expectations run our lives, and they all ping urgency.
I understand the temptation to approach life with a “healthy dose of urgency.”
It makes us look and feel responsive, engaged, and caring.
It collapses decision making fog.
It keeps us moving. And moving is another virtue, right?
It feels good to be busy.
It doesn’t, actually. But it does.
Urgency gives us meaning to borrow when we can’t find it without.
The problem is, we want peace. And that seems to run antithetical.
When we stop, instead of finding peace, it feels like we just traded anxiety (from the grind) for anxiety (from stillness).
What we don’t see is, the anxiety we feel from stillness isn’t new.
Stillness, actually, doesn’t create anxiety. It simply removes the noise that was drowning out the anxiety that was already there.
What we did was trade it for the grind.
When we get still, we begin to feel what was there, and before we can put our finger on it, we freak out and reach for our phone.
Urgency hides. It’s an effective way of not hearing the questions you really need to answer.
What am I doing?
Is this it?
What do I actually want?
It keeps you moving without pause. It’s yoga without savasana. Beethoven’s symphony without the rests. Constant urgency is the noise that buries you. And when you hear the question, what do I want? You can’t answer, and that scares you.
It doesn’t matter if your urgency is borrowed (what you do for others, for optics, for approval) or if it originates from you. While the latter is certainly better, if left unchecked, it also becomes problematic. Because even what comes from you ends up not feeling like a choice. It burns you out. Why?
Urgency trains you to find meaning, not in living, but in scarcity.
I have a self-imposed deadline to publish every Saturday. When I feel it as urgency, I know I’m stuck in performance mode. That takes me to the very last minute with more stress than necessary. When I feel it as an anchor that becomes a part of my day’s rhythm, as something I chose because this is important to me, it’s simply that: morning rhythm, deep work. This doesn’t mean I don’t keep deadlines. Nor does it mean I don’t carve time out on my calendar. I do both. The difference is in the feeling. And that feeling of this is what I do every morning versus this is what I’m trying to do, or this is what I have to get done by Saturday puts my nervous system in the corresponding mode: survive or live.
I want to live.
What I do becomes devotional. In the same way one would say, I can’t, I work during that time. Without apology; as simply fact.
Rhythm doesn’t ask you to perform. It asks you to arrive, and keep arriving, until the question isn’t what do I want? but what do I know to be true?
Eat warm, breathe slow, keep a rhythm.
– Savitree