Uragency, hopelessness, and despair

How much of your hopelessness and despair are tied to urgency, the feeling that something has to happen right now and if it doesn’t happen right now then it will never happen or can never happen?

What else becomes available or possible when we back away from urgency as our default temporality?

What are the practices in your life that support you in slowing down and connecting to deep time beyond this moment, this year, this lifetime?

There are times when urgency is necessary—in the case of imminent physical harm, in the wake of natural disasters, in the face of ongoing war and the devastation of life and livability, for example.

And still:
I think about this quote from @adriennemareebrown every day: “There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.”
I believe this as deeply as I believe anything.

While there are times when urgency is necessary, I am convinced that when we live in a constant state of urgency in all parts of our lives, we are not only creating more crises, but we are also sowing more hopelessness and despair.

​I turn again and again to practices that cultivate temporalities other than urgency—the deep cyclic time of astrology, the quiet stillness of sitting with stones, the glacial intentionality of dancing butoh, the steadiness and ease in asana practices, moving at the pace of my own body when I choose to walk rather than drive somewhere, and more.
I hope you also have practices for cultivating possibilities other than urgency.