Urgency

There's a Lao Tzu quote that I love: "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

The image of a redwood, a majestic oak tree, or a saguaro cactus come to mind every time I read this quote. These truly impressive plants are famous for their size and the sometimes hundreds of years they have been alive. They’ve been through wars, famines, droughts, and floods, slowly growing, inching their way towards the sky every year. 

There’s nothing they need to do except exist and they still grow. 

What would our lives look like if we adopted the concept of slow, steady, inevitable growth?

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly realistic in our highly connected world where everything is urgent. If you don’t answer someone’s IM or email, they text you. If you don’t answer the text, they call you. And I’d bet that most of the time, what was urgent to them is not actually urgent. 

While thinking about this, I laughed at the memory of what my mom called “30 minutes in Macy’s.” With four kids, we often needed stuff for school. Outfits for a spirit day, shoes, or maybe a new shirt just because we wanted it. The point was we all had busy schedules — sports, homework, theater productions, etc. — so if we wanted to get what we needed, it had to be fast. We’d pull up to Macy’s and split up, coming back together at the register 30 minutes later. 

This was obviously my mom’s attempt to do her very best to work the schedule to check off everything that needed to be done. And I’m super grateful for that! But learning how to not shop like a maniac isn’t easy. To this day, I struggle to window shop. If I’m shopping, it’s with an objective in mind. And I can’t leisurely stroll around in a store or else the stress starts to mount up inside me. In short: I have no chill. 

I’m notoriously impatient. When something needs to get done, it’s got to get done. If you get in the way of the plan I have for myself, may God bless your soul. My mom was also a person who needed things done on her time. I remember watching football with my dad one Sunday. We told her we’d put up the Christmas lights after the game, but she needed it done now. So she went and started putting them up herself. 

Today, as an adult with an ever-growing “to do” list that would take several lifetimes to finish, I understand where her urgency came from… but I also understand it’s not constantly necessary. And I’m sure you already know or have guessed that urgency has harmful health effects, from increased adrenal hormones to higher blood pressure.

Constantly being in a hurry can kill you faster. 

This doesn’t mean to throw your “to do” list out the window or have no plan. But rather reassess what is actually “urgent.” 

Chances are pretty good that if I can’t do something right this second, nothing will happen. If I don’t get around to dusting today because I was doing an activity I enjoy, that’s okay. The world won’t end. If my run is a little slower than normal, that’s fine. I don’t need to always beat my time. If I’m home a little later because I was enjoying a chat with a friend, no big deal. 

A lot of the time, we create urgency in our heads. Not all of the time. Some things truly are urgent. But if everything becomes urgent, then how do understand true urgency? We are like “the boy who cried wolf” to ourselves until rushing from one thing to the next is the norm. And that can’t happen. For our physical and mental wellbeing, urgency can’t be the norm. 

This week’s 1% Better challenge is to start questioning urgency when the feeling creeps in. Stop your train of thought and ask yourself, “Is this urgent?” And if it’s not, then don’t worry about it. If it matters, you’ll get around to it. Remember, "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” You are also  a part of nature. You are a living, breathing being and you weren’t put on this planet to rush through life.

With gratitude,

Natalie