The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

So how do you stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the midst of all this chaos? That’s the pressing question raised by John Mark Comer in his book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

Comer writes poetically that “the mind is the portal to the soul.” If that is true, then what we fill our time and our minds with will undoubtedly shape who we become; our character. If we fill our days with the noise and vitriol of 24 hour news channels. If we fill our days chattering with all the angry “victims” on Twitter. If we fill out day coveting other people’s success and happiness on Facebook, how can we expect our minds to become anything other than a tangled mess of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger and envy? And, isn’t that what the social and news networks are selling anyway: angst & envy? Apparently so.

A few weeks ago, a former Facebook Executive, Frances Haugen, testified in front of Congress as an official corporate whistleblower. U.S. law protects corporate whistleblowers who share insider information about potential corporate malfeasance. Haugen confidently told lawmakers in Washington, DC that Facebook corporate executives knew its apps (Facebook, and Instagram) were harming the mental health of some users, but particularly harming young users. Haugen testified that Facebook should be allowed to “declare moral bankruptcy and we can figure out how to fix these things together.” Asked to clarify what she meant by “moral bankruptcy,” Haugen said she envisioned a process like financial bankruptcy where there is a “mechanism” to “forgive them” and “move forward.” Haugen went on to clarify that Facebook’s algorithms are built to intentionally place more inflammatory posts in your feed to facilitate that angst and envy.

Haugen, in an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS, claimed that these algorithms are responsible for many of Facebook’s problems. Those problems include fueling polarization, misinformation and other toxic content. Haugen further shared that Facebook knows that if they make the algorithms safer that “people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money.” So there you have it. The buying and selling of angst and envy.

Even before Facebook was fueling polarization and peddling toxic content, there was plenty of noise and confusion in the world to distract people.

Some of the greatest figures in history refused to fill their minds with that noise and confusion. Instead, they embraced stillness. Sir Winston Churchill, enjoyed laying bricks and painting at his Chartwell estate. In the meantime he saved us from speaking German and celebrating Hitler’s birthday every April. Mister Rogers daily routine began at 5 a.m. with prayer, reflection and Bible reading. Each morning he prayed for his family and friends by name. Anne Frank used her time to quietly journal and left the world a timeless glimpse of appalling history.

Lack of Introspection

The internet is designed to be an interruption system.

—Nicolas Carr

In his recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr writes, “the internet is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.” I can relate. It seems that we rarely have undivided attention anymore. That we are always plugged in. That we are always fragmented in thought. At least some portion of our mindshare is consumed by what we are missing when we aren’t constantly receiving “information”.

Your Conscience is Calling

I heard someone recently suggest that it’s okay to check your phone during a meeting or a meal with friend. But, only if you really need to answer an email or text or take a short phone call. I know that’s become acceptable-and I also know that I’ve done it more times than I care to admit. But, if you extract yourself from 2021 and travel back in time to, say, 2005, would it be acceptable? Of course not. Further, would it ever be acceptable to pull out a newspaper or a magazine in the middle of lunch with a friend, instead of talking to the person right in front of you? Of course not. But that’s where we are. It’s become acceptable to divide your attention under the auspices of busyness or the search for information.

Do Nothing….

According to Comer, “the solution to an over-busy life is not more time. The solution is to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters.”

Maybe that’s the impetus for the growth of apps like Headspace and Calm. These free apps promote their ability to help you-do nothing. Literally nothing. Their meditation modules offer calming sounds and voices that allow users to disconnect from the noisy world for a few minutes each day. The Calm app has been downloaded over 100 million times.

We hear the refrain “I’m great, just busy” so often we assume pathological busyness is okay. After all, everybody else is busy too. But what if busyness isn’t healthy?

—Comer

Unplugged

Vacation and travel site Priceline conducted a survey in 2019. Difficulty unplugging from the office, guilt about being away from clients and projects and reputational risk all factor into the concern that employees face when contemplating vacation. In 2019, employees forfeited, on average, about half of their paid time off.

Whether you have a day-job or you simply drive carpool and keep the children from climbing the walls, you work hard. And, with any luck, you get two weeks of vacation each year. Two weeks.

So we kill ourselves all year for two weeks of rest and relaxation? Is that really what we signed up for? See, it’s only during that down time that we eliminate some of the noise and distraction of life. That we find the elusive stillness.

Taking time away is healthy. It helps us remember who we are. It helps us reconnect with our own interests and hobbies. It helps us rekindle relationships. It helps us stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive.

There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived….

—John Mark Comer

And, that’s the benefit of stillness. The opportunity to relax and recharge. To look around at the world. To get off the merry-go-round for a minute and truly live life to the fullest.

Do you ever catch yourself with the sneaking suspicion that you’ll wake up on your deathbed with this nagging sense that somehow, in all the hurry and busyness and frenetic activity, you missed the most important things?

—John Mark Comer

I do. And, I wrote about this in 2020 in a piece called Top Five Regrets of the Dying . (I seem to refer back to that article a lot.) Turns out that the amalgam of regrets can be summarized. The dying regret that they missed out on being happier by spending time with their friends and family. And the reason they missed out is cause they were simply too busy working. How trivial must that busyness look from that vantage point?

The Red Zone

Now that the pandemic is drawing to a close (again), it’s time to do a post-mortem. Are you prepared to go back to the way things were? Are you prepared to return to the chaos of a hurried life?

Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

—Comer

This pandemic has been a bitch. We are all restless. But, I think getting a chance to slow down is exactly what we needed. We were overdue. Long overdue.

But here’s the irony. The antidote is to busyness is stillness; to slow down even more. To be even more still. Try meditation. You can download the Headspace meditation app for free. Yeah, it’s weird at first, but anything that people have been doing for thousands of years must have some advantages.

It’s time to slow down. As Artis Whitman once wrote, It’s time to “look forward to the beauty of the next moment, the next hour, the promise of a good meal, sleep, a book, a movie, the likelihood that tonight the stars will shine and tomorrow the sun will shine. Sink roots into the present until the strength grows to think about tomorrow.”

If you liked this story, please forward it to someone you care about. Particularly if they spend too much time rushing through life. Maybe they’ll just change their perspective on life and slow down a bit.