things i’m choosing instead of urgency

for most of my life, urgency was my native language. it wasn’t taught explicitly; it was simply everywhere, stitched into the air i breathed. urgency wasn’t just for emergencies—it was the default setting for living well. you moved fast or you didn’t move at all. you answered immediately. you decided quickly. you built momentum like your entire self-worth depended on it, because secretly, you suspected that maybe it did. the idea of slowing down wasn’t just impractical; it felt dangerous. like if you stopped sprinting, the life you were supposed to be building would simply pass you by without so much as a polite nod.

i don’t think i’m alone in this. most of us were raised inside a culture that treats speed as virtue. faster results, faster replies, faster solutions. you’re supposed to know your five-year plan at nineteen, your brand at twenty-three, your fallback strategy by twenty-five. urgency is disguised as ambition. as responsibility. as adulthood. it’s never presented as a choice. it’s just there, humming beneath every task, every conversation, every internal monologue about whether you’re doing enough, being enough, becoming enough.

and for a while, i really did believe in it. urgency gave me a framework. it made life feel efficient, if not exactly satisfying. it told me where to go even when i had no idea what i actually wanted. if you’re always moving quickly, you don’t have to sit with the existential discomfort of asking if you’re moving in the right direction. you just run and trust that whoever runs the hardest must be the closest to winning.

but lately—and by lately i mean somewhere between the thousandth sleepless night and the slow heartbreak of realizing that constant productivity was not, in fact, making me a happier person—i’ve been choosing something different. not because i became enlightened. not because i finally read the right book or cracked the code on work-life balance. honestly, i started slowing down because i was too tired to keep sprinting for prizes i wasn’t even sure i wanted.

it started small. i stopped responding to texts immediately, even though the lowercase part of my brain whispered that this made me a bad friend. i let emails sit overnight without apology. i let myself think about things for longer than was probably efficient. and i noticed something curious: nothing catastrophic happened. the world kept spinning. people waited. decisions ripened slowly instead of exploding on impact. the monster i’d been outrunning—this phantom deadline for a perfect life—turned out to be imaginary. the only person demanding urgency from me, it seemed, was me.

so i’ve been building a mindset shift. it doesn’t look radical from the outside. it’s not a big career change or a dramatic life reset. it’s made of small, stubborn choices. things i’m choosing, one day at a time, instead of urgency.

i’m choosing conversations that don’t have an agenda. the kind where you meander through half-baked thoughts and strange tangents without trying to solve or optimize anything. i’m learning that some of the best connections are built in the spaces between conclusions. urgency demands conclusions. presence allows for questions.

i’m choosing walks without tracking steps. movement without goals attached. walking just to see what the air feels like today, what the trees are doing, what strange overheard fragments of conversation the world has to offer. urgency wants outcomes. i’m trying to want experiences.

i’m choosing hobbies i’m bad at. crafts that don’t impress anyone. projects that will never see the inside of an etsy shop. i’m letting myself paint badly, knit lumpy scarves, write poems that don’t rhyme. urgency says if you’re not getting better, it’s not worth doing. i’m learning that maybe getting better was never the point.

i’m choosing to answer questions later. not because i’m being coy or strategic. because some questions deserve to sit for a while. because “i don’t know yet” is a perfectly legitimate response to the world’s constant, insistent demands for clarity. urgency makes everything binary: yes or no, now or never. but real life—good life—needs more maybe.

i’m choosing friendships that don’t require constant performance. friendships where you can disappear for a month into your own life and then come back without elaborate apologies. urgency would have you believe that relationships are maintained by constant proof of loyalty. i’m starting to think they’re maintained by trust in something slower, something less neurotic, something built quietly over time.

i’m choosing books that are slow, dense, sometimes confusing. books that require a different kind of attention, the kind i thought i didn’t have anymore. urgency taught me to skim, to optimize my intake of information, to “get the gist.” but there’s a different kind of pleasure in lingering inside an idea, in allowing yourself to get a little lost before you find your way back.

i’m choosing mornings that aren’t battlefields. mornings where the to-do list doesn’t hit me like a bucket of cold water the second i open my eyes. mornings where it’s enough to notice the light shifting on the walls, the first good sip of coffee, the fact that i get another ordinary day to figure things out.

i’m choosing to believe that not every problem needs to be solved today. urgency would have you think that all discomfort is a sign of emergency. but not all discomfort is dangerous. some of it is just… part of being alive. i’m trying to sit with it longer. to learn its shape. to trust that some things unravel themselves without brute force.

and, perhaps most importantly, i’m choosing softness with myself when i forget all of this. because i do forget. often. because urgency isn’t just a habit; it’s a survival mechanism. because some part of me still believes, in my worst moments, that i am only as good as what i’ve accomplished lately. but if urgency is a habit, softness can be one too. i can practice it, badly and inconsistently, until it becomes part of my muscle memory.

sometimes i think about how urgency sells itself as the faster route to happiness. if you move quickly enough, you’ll get there sooner. if you optimize harder, you’ll suffer less. if you run faster, you’ll win the race before you even realize you were tired. but the older i get, the more i realize that the race isn’t real. there’s nowhere to arrive where life stops being life—messy, unpredictable, ordinary, sometimes breathtaking, often confusing.

so i’m choosing something else. not slowness for its own sake. not passivity. not laziness dressed up as mindfulness. but a life that isn’t organized around panic. a life that doesn’t mistake urgency for meaning. a life that believes good things—real things—can stand a little waiting.

i’m choosing the smallness of an ordinary day, the luxury of thinking before responding, the radical act of being present in a world that wants you to be everywhere else. i’m choosing books read slowly, conversations that unfold imperfectly, friendships that stretch instead of sprint. i’m choosing the kind of success that feels good in my body, not just in my résumé. i’m choosing to build a life that doesn’t feel like an emergency.

and on the good days, when i remember, when i move slowly enough to notice, it feels a little bit like magic. it feels a little bit like freedom.