What the hurries are hiding

The urgent thing kills us. Its avidity has no limits. It trends to invade us like a

voracious cancer. The urgency enters through the door, the telephone, the electronic

The urgent thing kills us. Its avidity has no limits. It trends to invade us like a

voracious cancer. The urgency enters through the door, the telephone, the electronic

mail, from all sides: calls that demand an immediate answer, works that must be made with

prowl, meetings are advanced to its scheduled time for non sense reasons, e mails

asking for reception confirmation, and immediate answer, interruptions of all type that,

cheeky, enter without calling and tend to invade us under the shelter of a label that

seems to justify the harassment: “!It is urgent!”, and that requires incessantly that we

run marathon to rate of sprint.

Inefficient urgency

Diverse studies maintain that it is possible to lose until 80% of the working day in

interruptions generated by the apparently urgent thing. And I say apparently because in

most cases is evident that it was not critical at all. We do not deny the fact that there are

really urgent and important questions, but are less of those than we think.

The causes of this daily mess are multiple, but without doubt one of most important is

that there is who lives to cause the chaos and the anguish from the urgency to assure its

control, its power and its position. These profiles pretend to show authority positions,

but with a lack of abilities that disable them to be really competent. The professionalism

and the efficiency tend to be discreet, humble and elegant. Plain speaking, to be urgent

and to tighten are the same thing, and the ones that does not know to manage in an

efficient and human way, trend to tighten unnecessarily to which they surround them, to

feel like the king of the hen house, the dominant alpha of the herd, when in reality it is

an impertinent mosquito, or better, a pain in the bottom. The urgency is in many cases

an eloquent disguise of the incompetence, the cretinism and the own inner emptiness.

The diseases

According to the WHO, there are more and more people depressed in the labour

surroundings due to the pressure and to the anguish, clear symptoms of the urgency.

This is so popular, that in many professionals abounds phrases with the style “in all the

day I have not had a little while to go to the restroom” (Can you imagine?)

“Next week I can neither be ill nor have a crisis: I have full agenda already”

“I am late to my yoga session: what stress!”

Expressions that show the folly of the human being and a life style, insane. Sometimes

commentaries said with irony; other times with resignation, and others with naiveté, in a

description of the slavery of the agenda, the haste, the clock. They are voices of stressed

anonymous professionals and hungry people, imprisoned or victims of “ the urgent

thing “ brought by a third party and often, also, by himself.

In the delicious book “Tuesday with my old professor”, its protagonist, Morrie

Schwartz, the old wise and dying professor who gives his last lessons of life to his loved

and old student, says:” A part of the problem (…) it is the haste that has everybody. The

people have not found sense in their lives, for that reason they run constantly looking

for it. They think about the next car, the next house, the next work. And later they

discover that those things also are empty, and continue running”. How crude is the

common sense used by Professor Schwartz!

Instead of looking for the deep and intimate causes of the urgency in our inner self, it is

easier the use of analgesic or the dressing of easy application that masks the acute pain.

Or even the use of milky products or multivitamins that promises to reinforce our

defences, so we do not stop until we burst, and that is valid for the small ones of the

house, that must go all the day to top.

In addition, we live in a society in love with the techniques that provide short cuts

(Internet, remote, navigating, analgesic controls…), and is hard to us to accept that

quality of life will not arrive from the way of the short cuts. But the temporary

lightening that the short cuts contribute to us, gives us forces that we use to be more and

more occupied in other things, without even stop to think deeply if what we do is, in

reality, the most important thing, what it brings more value to the project, to the task, to

the relationship, to the environment, to ourselves.

Hardly the quality of life is based on the rapidity, and less on the urgency. It has more

importance what you do, and how you do it, than the speed in making it.

Paradoxes

There is a paradox that does not stop surprising me, and that by misfortune occurs very

frequently in our days: good professionals, that apply enormous amounts of time and

resources to analyze and to manage even the smallest detail of their company, even of

each product and service, are incapable to manage with a minimum of common sense

their own life. Along their professional career they make tens, hundreds of studies and

analysis on its company or products, but peculiarly, they do not stop to think with calm

which without a doubt is but important: they themselves, its life…

Perhaps by laziness, ignorance, haste, fear. Or because to reinvent themselves is an

exercise that requires much honesty and anger. Or because they did not even have

considered it. Or because nobody has told them that it is possible and it is not foolish.

When the essential stops to the urgent thing

All we know that someday we will die, but it is hard to believe it. Probably only when

the life does a strong attention call to us through the unexpected disease, the serious

accident or the death of the loved being, only then we face the essential, the crucial

subjects of the life that normally have to do with the common sense (what do we live

for?), or with the love. Then the urgency suddenly goes to hell, and the important thing,

the essential, arises with a clearness that makes to be embarrassed to the wise people.

William James said “to be wise is the art of knowing what to ignore”. Perhaps we live

causing the urgency to fill the emptiness that causes our avidity. The feeling of

permanent urgency disappears when we realize that with the essential things, with what

cannot be seen, with our affection, even only with ourselves, it is enough to us.

Text Credits: Alex Rovira Celma

Image Credits: 

Alana Steinberg, Alessandra Carona, Annasara Bjaaland, Azza Ku, Bjorn Wunderlich, David Sandell, Desiree Delgado, Emily Roman, Hans Georg Fischer, Ian Boyd, Jess Winkler, Karen Sofia Colon, Leopoldo Macaya, Pino Barile, RO_Chelle, Steven Collins, Torfi Omarsson, Tom Magliery, Wade Langley.