What’s the Rush?
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The urgency you feel is often not yours — Much of what registers as internal pressure to hurry has been absorbed from cultural and systemic forces.
Rushing often prevents the very outcomes we are rushing toward — Growth, healing, mastery, and meaningful change tend to unfold on organic timelines and when we rush we get further away from the results we were chasing.
Intentional pacing is not the same as slow — It is the practice of matching our pace to the actual nature of what we are trying to do.
Recognizing the current pace
Modern life has a particular sense of urgency that follows us into meetings we don’t need to be in, conversations that could unfold more intentionally, meals we eat while checking our phones, and healing processes we secretly wish would move a lot faster. There is a nagging awareness that there is always more we could be doing, more we should be finishing, and more we should have already figured out.
Somewhere along the way, many of us have began to internalize speed as a measure of value — the faster that we accomplish things, the more capable we appear. The quicker we recover from a setback, the more resilient we must be.
The trouble is, some things that truly matter genuinely ask for more time and thoughtfulness. To understand takes time — to heal, to trust, to develop skill, the very formation of who we are and who we become as people takes time. But when we move through things too quickly, serendipitously enough, we don’t actually arrive faster. We usually find ourselves with less of what we were reaching for, or we find ourselves at the same place yet again only to find that no true lesson or development has been gained.
Today I invite you to slow down, to observe the pace that you have been keeping and ask if that pace is actually serving what you are trying to cultivate for yourself. Today we will consider what becomes possible when intentionality replaces urgency as you navigate through your life.
What has taught us to hurry
Before we take a look inward, it is worth naming that the urgency that we carry is not wholly personal but rather shaped and reinforced by systems that we exist within.
We are living through what many refer to as an achievement society, one in which productivity has become a moral virtue and rest has quietly become a form of failure. Cultural theorists have noted the way that modern capitalism has eroded the natural rhythms of pause, extending work and consumption into every hour of the day. In Jenny Odell’s, “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” — what is emphasized is the difficulty of protecting our attention in a world designed to fragment it.
What this results in is a internalized set of beliefs that most of us never consciously chose: rest must be earned, speed is proof of competence, waiting is falling behind, and if you are not producing you are not valuable. These messages are so pervasive that we might at times mistake them for our own values, when in truth they are just ambient noise of the systems that we live inside.
You might recognize this in your own life as:
A latent sense of guilt when you are not engaged in something productive
A tendency to measure the value of your day by how much you have completed
An impatience with your own healing, learning, or emotional processing
Naming these dynamics matter because you cannot make a different choice about your pace until you can see the forces that have been setting it for you.
The costs we pay, emotionally
As a therapist, I notice that the cost of rushing show up the most acutely in our emotional lives. This is not an encouragement towards cyclical lamenting over our negative circumstances, but to illuminate the value of being with experiences for the amount of time wherein which new learnings or insights can be extrapolated — insights that are often held on the other side of the pain that we might not want to face in an intentional and direct manner.
Psychologist John Welwood, noted for bridging the gap between psychological and spiritual work, coined the term spiritual bypassing to describe the tendency to use spiritual practices to sidestep emotional material rather than actually moving through it. The related concept, emotional bypassing, describes the pattern of skipping past difficult feelings by keeping busy, intellectualizing, and moving on before any feelings have been felt.
These are both forms of evading elements of life and in both a truth remains — until we are ready and willing to face what we are avoiding, it will cyclically return until we meet it with courage and intentionality.
Digging Deeper —
To better understand this, we can look to Psychodynamic Theory and Jungian (Analytical) Psychology.
Psychodynamic theory describes the tendency of the psyche to unconsciously recreate unresolved emotional dynamics, often in an attempt to finally work them through — meaning, we can often feel that something continues to confront us as we attempt to avoid it as it is requesting deeper attention from us. Jungian Psychology asserts the concept of the shadow, the parts of ourselves that we have not consciously integrated, that tend to influence our behaviors the most when we refuse to look towards them.
We might recognize this as:
The person who rushes past heartbreak, often finds themselves in a similar pattern with a new person
The professional who ignores burnout, only to arrive at a more debilitating version of it a year later
The grief that has been set aside becomes an emotional disruption on an ordinary Tuesday
The human psyche is powerful and remarkably persistent — the lessons that we don’t learn will return as many times as it takes for us to be still and present enough to receive it.
Off The Page: Actioning The Insights
Cultivating Awareness
Your practice this week
This week, your practice is to bring conscious attention to your pace, and begin choosing intentionality over urgency in the specific places where it matters most. Take a look at the reflection questions and strategies below to support you this week in moving intentionally — and away from the binary of fast or slow.
Reflection Questions:
What are you currently attempting to rush in your life?
Where does your urgency come from? Is it contextually relevant and appropriate?
What emotions do you attempt to move past too quickly?
What lessons keep returning in different forms that you might not be recognizing?
Strategies:
Notice the urge to rush before you follow it
When you feel the internal push to hurry this week, simply pause for a moment of breath to reflect. You are not attempting to slow everything down, but rather introducing awareness of your current circumstances. Some things asks for us to act in an expeditious manner, and others actually don’t — create reflection space to discern the difference.
Choose one experience to move through fully
Identify a single experience this week that you have been tempted to rush past. This can be an emotion, a conversation, a creative process, or even an intentional meal. Simply give it the time it asks for. What we fully meet rarely needs to return, while what we hurry past will always find its way back to our metaphorical doorstep.
Match your pace to the nature of what you are doing
Allow your pace to match the nature of what you are doing by taking space to ask what is required to accomplish what is ahead of you. When our pace matches what we are doing, the work can feel lighter and the outcome can become richer. Take note of what changes personally for you.
The destination you are reaching for will not be lost by moving at a more honest pace. The steady, intentional act of meeting your life as it happens is not a compromise on your ambition. Intentionality is the condition that allows your ambition to bear fruit that lasts.
Thank You
Thank you for joining me this week! I’m excited to keep sharing insights from my work, research, and personal journey with you.
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A Listen for the Week
As I continue to consume relevant content, I will share it here to deepen knowledge, perspective, and inquiry on a variety of topics related to wellness. This week I am sharing a recent episode from the Speaking of Psychology podcast from the American Psychological Association.
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