Calmer maybe. More trusting. Perhaps more in tune with the what, the where, the how, and the why.
For most of us, operating with urgency is standard procedure.
Rushing to get from one place to the next, to learn as much as you can as fast as possible, to solve a complex problem right now because your boss needs to show the investors like yesterday.
Within this urgency, you often end up compromising your body, mind, needs, and ideals for a quicker result because “no one has time to wait.”
The curse of convenience has shrouded many of us. Made us believe that faster is better.
And when we couldn’t do that thing quickly, we lacked what it took to be fit for the role, to be productive, to be valuable… even if slower, easier, and more calculated was the better way.
One might argue, if the now is all we have and the next moment never promised, why wouldn’t I race my way forward? Rushing myself through ideas, meals, and relationships because I deserve to have it all provided for me right now.
This is often represented as the urgency of knowing right or wrong, to fix or forgive, to leave or love, to do or be done for, to give or take right now.
This represents an endless battle stream of conditionality for command and convenience that present society preaches as pure and just. Being satisfied with nothing only with more productivity and more things.
Yet, we must step back to consider if urgency is even rightfully placed in our lives.
What if where urgency bleeds, ease would sit in peace? Where living a slower, fuller, and more present life becomes the obvious choice.
Stillness speaks truth
So does awareness, spaciousness, and breath.
These show us where urgency is rotting us. Eating away at our self-connection, self-confidence, self-value, and self-respect.
Where it’s rushing us through experiences of love, loss, accomplishment, and failure because again “no one has time to wait.”
Even with the climate clock counting down in Times Square, there is still time.
Each second holds a marker of depth and in it is life, is breath, is choice; is a decision to hold on, rush through, or release and feel the joys of releasing (or falling into ease).
What happens when you give yourself a new lease on life or perspective? One where you get to redefine what it means to be and move and flow from a place of ease.
To be at ease. To return to ease, with ease. No longer ripping your hands to shreds in the name of urgency.
Of course, there’s a time and place to move with speed.
But when that momentum finds its end point, the return flows to its natural state of ease—ideally.
Beneath the anxiety, the stress, the identification with how quickly you can or should get things done or please people, is a state of innately curated and decidedly cultivated ease that your being breathes from.
It is our job, past the awareness of conditioning, to find that place again and learn to be from there.
So, without a constant sense of urgency, who are you?
What opens up to you, for you? What speaks to you? How do you hear it, see it, understand it? How do you see yourself in it?
When the heart, mind, and body are hardened from the compressed state of urgency, pray that in time you can feel the expansion that slower, fuller, and more present moments create.
The clarity that comes from taking another or deeper look. The joy that swallows you when you realize that you have more time.
In truth, it no longer matters if there is and isn’t time—for that’s often negotiable. What matters is whether you’re rushing to feel something, get to that place, have that status, or do that thing.
For in the rushing, you may not get what you expected most.
You may miss things, overlook people, judge your inner knowing, or choose from a place of eagerness that looks past a quality or characteristic that simply doesn’t fit.
When a threat presents itself, your body vibrates fast, heart races, and mind quickly calculates how to evade or eliminate the perceived threat. And, the end goal, ideally is your body returning to a state of rest.
However, urgency is often done from a place of lack.
This is when the perceived threat remains stored in your body and subconscious mind, fed by constant worry, need for validation, or a fear of rejection, abandonment, disappointment or judgment.
And sustaining this feeling blurs the lines of who you are, what the real threat is (if there is one at all), and your perception of urgency.
Now you’re an anxious reck who needs to control every facet of your life. Now you take and manipulate even when there’s no consenting yes. Now you can’t breathe or manage to know who you are beyond the need to have everything figured out right now.
Take a breath
Take your time
Take up space
From a place
Of fullness
—Echo
How to start slowing things down
The pace in which you eat, get dressed in the morning, brush your teeth, talk to yourself, or do just about anything, are all the places where I bet you could slow down.
It’s what my therapist recommended to me: to move at a snail’s (or turtle’s) pace. To really take the time to put my socks on in the morning, to massage my face because it makes me feel good.
When I slow down, I’m no longer running from myself or allowing the excitement of life to distract me from what’s been begging to be healed.
Instead, I get to know who I am. I get a better feel for who I am.
When I’m not labeling myself as anxious or impatient, who am I? When I’m not rushing to the market to get bread and eggs, who I am?
These slow moments give me a chance to breathe into this being that I’ve always been underneath the stress.
Now, I get to decide who I am and who I want to be.
I encourage you to start with the breath. First:
- Relax your forehead.
- Release your tongue from the roof of your mouth.
- Part your lips, unclench your teeth.
- Relax your shoulders.
- Unclench your fists.
- Look straight ahead with an easy gaze.
- Take a deep breath in and relax your shoulders again.
- Rest your feet on the ground or just straight down in front of you.
- Straighten your spine.
- Open your chest.
- Take a deep breath in for 2 counts and exhale for 6 counts with your lips shaped like you’re whistling.
- Do this again. Notice your posture and re-adjust as needed.
- Now breathe in for 5 counts, hold for 2 counts, breathe out for 5 counts, hold for 2 counts.
- Repeat a few more times.
- And when you’re ready, come back.
Notice that you are in your body and with your body. Whisper to it, tell the cells you love them. Tell your joints, hormones, organs, and blood the same.
Take this moment, where there is more than enough time for things to wait, to honor your being and the vessel that carries it, honor this time you took to just be, and honor the fact that you can be at ease.
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EcoWell Co. 