Why you’re not in a hurry to prove anything.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that everything needs to happen quickly.
There’s a whole culture built around urgency—around proving your value by how fast you can respond, produce, improve. There’s the idea that if you pause, even for a moment, you’ll fall behind. Someone else will get there first.
But I’ve started to wonder what actually happens when you slow down.
There have been stretches of time when I decided not to rush. Days when I didn’t measure my worth by how much I accomplished, or how efficiently I moved from one task to the next. And nothing terrible happened. The world kept going. Most of the deadlines turned out to be arbitrary.
When urgency disappears, other things have room to appear.
You notice details you’d otherwise skim past. You can sit with an idea long enough to see what it becomes. You can hear yourself think. Sometimes you realize the thing you were racing toward didn’t matter as much as you thought it did.
There’s a difference between what’s important and what’s urgent.
Urgency is often manufactured—an expectation imposed by other people, or by the part of you that’s afraid to look unproductive. Importance feels different. It’s quieter and harder to impress. It doesn’t always demand your immediate attention, but it stays with you anyway.
Life expands in the absence of panic.
Sometimes it’s worth finding out what happens when you stop trying to keep up.
Longitudes Unclaimed 