A Sense of Urgency

25 Jun 2024

I had been working on a special project with another engineer for a couple weeks when Kalpana said she wanted to talk. “I want to make sure you and Charlie are feeling a sense of urgency.” It was important to her that we didn’t think the pressure was off just because we were working by ourselves on a special project. After all, this was a corporation on a mission to change the world and make money. We had shit to do.

At EnergySavvy, my first job out of college, I nearly always felt a sense of urgency. I was a motivated and driven employee. But I was driven by my unconscious fears that I didn’t have what it takes to make it in the world, that somehow I was inescapably inadequate. Whether it was not catching a bug in my code or not getting things done per our timeline, I never quite seemed to measure up to my expectations. So I tried harder. For years, every time Kalpana said she wanted to talk with me, a great fear would rise up in my belly and I was certain she was going to fire me. Usually it was the opposite, but it didn’t matter because the fear was stronger than any evidence to the contrary.

Tara Brach calls this the “trance of unworthiness.”

Fast forward almost a decade and now I’m finally starting to become more aware of my deeper emotions and wake up from the trance. I notice that simply getting in front of the computer for a few minutes is enough to tense my shoulders, speed up my breathing, and get me chewing on my nails. Doing simple work tasks brings on alternating waves of anxiety and anger–anxiety that I’m not measuring up to expectations, and anger that I can’t seem to stay in control and keep running into unexpected obstacles and disappointments. Often these emotions become strong enough that I might need a full hour of simple lying down meditation to release the tension. I used to think feeling this way at work was normal. It’s certainly normal-ized because many if not most office workers experience work in a similar way.

Philipp Moffitt writes:

If someone was hitting you in your stomach, squeezing your neck, or not letting you breathe, you’d quickly call such behavior violent. Yet when these same painful sensory experiences arise in reaction to your own thoughts or actions, you fail to recognize your behavior as violent. In your daily life, have you not repeatedly experienced these bodily sensations or others like them?

The truth is that the sense of urgency Kalpana prized¹ is an ubiquitous form of hidden violence in our society. And it is very well hidden because it is an internalized habit we often don’t know we have.

Violence is always justified by fear, and our sense of urgency is no different. It is based in unconscious and unexamined fears about ourselves and the world, usually something along the lines of “I shouldn’t have to feel this way”, “the world shouldn’t be like this”, or as in my case “I’m not good enough.”

And we have very cleverly imprisoned ourselves in this state of mind by convincing ourselves that the alternative to urgency is apathy. Whether it’s work, politics, social justice, climate change, difficult family relations, or fitness goals, we tend to grasp on to one of these two states of mind, or vacillate between them. But apathy is only another form of violence. If urgency is dropping bombs on your body, then apathy is locking it away in maximum security prison.

The good news is that you can find your way out of this trap by learning to see fear as your friend. Your fear, your anxiety, your existential unease, are all patterns of emotion and thought that are meant to be listened to. They feel so strong because they need your attention, it’s as simple as that. You can treat your fear like you would a child who is afraid. Sometimes the child is afraid because some action needs to be taken to protect them, sometimes they just need to be held. When the action has been taken or enough kind attention has been given, the fear disappears.

What I have slowly come to realize is that feeling a sense of urgency is never an appropriate response to a circumstance of life. If something is truly urgent, you act. There need not be any thought behind it. If you put your hand on a hot stove, you yank it back and yelp in pain. The sense of urgency is always extra, something we add to a situation because we are afraid. Of course, we often can’t help feeling a sense of urgency, especially because it is encouraged by our society. But we don’t have to believe it.

Finding a truly productive approach to the problems of our life, whether it’s work, politics, social justice, climate change, difficult family relations, or fitness goals, begins in how we treat ourselves. The Golden Rule states: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.” I think our society needs to recognize a corollary to the Golden Rule: “The way you treat yourself is the way you treat the world.”

Thomas Merton does a good job of describing where the sense of urgency leads:

…there is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent method most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

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