The current atmosphere in life screams Urgency. There are articles upon articles that tell you that unless you have urgency you are wasting your life, that you don’t value life - that time is dwindling and because of that you have to be striving, reaching, exhausting yourself everyday.
There is this “grind” or “hustle” culture that can be found all over social media. People working, grinding, getting it done, whatever slogan you want to toss out there that makes you feel busy and important. This culture is often full of people talking rather then hustling but also those that are acting, thinking that this hustle and urgency is the key to fulfillment in life and achieving your goals.
While I agree that you should be active and have purpose in life, this idea that you need to do more and be more to feel fulfilled or that you’re not appreciating life unless you’re hustling in my opinion is a lie.
It’s often a distraction.
Urgency is often a result of not dealing with a deeper issue.
For most people they get motivated during a realization that life is short. Viewing life as short is only a perspective. Life being short implies that people don’t get to do what they want to do in life. As if most people get to their death bed only to realize they had neglected things that actually matter to them. They spend their lives working, hustling, grinding and having a sense of urgency to pay the bills, to live the American Dream, to do more before their time is up, only to feel at the end of the day that they wish they would have spent more time just “being” and less time doing.
I want to see if you would be willing to approach life focusing on depth over width.
Would you be willing to focus on living a life that actually revolves around what you find important, what you value, and that focuses truly on letting the world see you as “you”.
Urgency pushes you into a space that is never present. Those deep moments in your life where you feel connected to others, apart of something much larger then yourself almost always come from being present in a situation. Sometimes I have these like “wow I am here” moments. Like a reality check and awareness that this is real and so good. I am here and I am apart of a greater shared human experience. It’s overwhelming but also humbling and grounding at the same time.
For me, I had to shift out of urgency into a mindset of focusing on what is important. What do I value, what do I want to go after. Most people I talk to are living a life of urgency in order to please others.
They are living a life designed by someone else and bound by anchors that stay in place because of shame and guilt.
I’ve been there. It creates some purpose, some foundation, but eventually you realize you’re exhausted, you’re living a life that someone else created. You’re striving for things that may be “good” but are not important to you as a person.
There is a big difference between doing "good" things and doing things that are important to you.
So how do we not have a spirit of urgency?
We think about where we want to go and who we want to be. We create a clear goal and direction of where we want to go and that becomes our focus. That becomes our compass. For most people they say, “I have no idea what I want to do”, but I have found people in their heart do know what they want to do. It has just been pushed aside due to shame and guilt or self doubt or the need to be accepted by family and friends.
The pressure is high in life to fall in line, but you do have a choice.
You have a choice to choose a goal, a direction, a purpose that is always upfront, that is always guiding the choices. We will all run into things we have to do. I am not suggesting that you can neglect the daily tasks of life, but what I am suggesting is that during those daily tasks of the everyday you can not get caught up in the spirit of urgency. When you have a clear goal and vision of who you want to be and where you want to go you begin to create depth because you start to figure out who you really are.
Most people live a whole life and never figure out who they are.
Once you figure out who you are is already enough and that the more you work on discovering yourself, what’s important, purpose - then urgency goes away.
Urgency often is a result in my life of not dealing with or understanding who I am and what I really want. Urgency is often created by a mindset of scarcity for me. That one day I will run out of "something"..... I don’t even know what this something is but I often catch myself running around 100mph chasing something only to realize what I am doing is not at all what I really want to be doing.
Maybe you can relate?
Everyday I fight to chip away at things. I do things slowly. I do things with purpose. I am not chasing instant fame, instant money, instant gratification. I am chasing the depth in life that creates fulfillment. True fulfillment. For me, life is long. Life is only short when you get to the end and realize that you didn’t do what you really wanted. That you really never knew yourself.
I don’t have it all figured out but part of the fun in life is figuring out who you are, your purpose, and how you can use that to make others great. When we make that shift the tight grip on urgency opens up.
This week try to take sometime to figure out who you really are. You may be surprised how much chatter comes up, but after that you get to some depth, some desires, some purposes, and you begin to see what is actually important to you.
Peace
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