The General Hastiness of Life

It’s rare that I get more than 6 hours of sleep in a night. 5 is a solid average.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to stop setting an alarm. I figured I would wake up when my body was done sleeping.

What surprised and frustrated me: I started waking up, feeling anxious that I had overslept, anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes before the alarm would have gone off had I set it.

I joke with my wife often that I get more done before 10:00 am than most people get done all day. You can do that when you wake up 4 hours before the rest of the world.

But it’s no laughing matter.

Lack of adequate sleep is attributed to all kinds of health problems later in life.

But this isn’t just about sleep because I know I’m not alone in thinking that the frenetic speed of life is approaching terminal velocity. Our insatiable need to get things done means we don’t slow down enough to recognize what’s most important or give enough time to things to do them well.

I love efficiency.

Being efficient in something means doing it in the best way you can (not always the fastest way) to mitigate the possibility of having to do it again. Hastiness often masquerades as efficiency. Hastiness in what we do — even when we’re trying to become something — means cutting corners. In the long run, taking shortcuts often means having to redo things.

Hastiness becomes habitual because you can get more done, even when the quality suffers.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn said:

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century.

In truth, however, our efforts to get more done leave so many of us overwhelmed, and when overwhelm hits, we surround ourselves with noise, blinking screens, and endless entertainment as a pseudo-therapy. We think we’re finding relief with endless scrolling when all we’re doing is anesthetizing ourselves; prolonging dealing with the overwhelm that leads to further hastiness until the problems we’ve created for ourselves seem too big to solve. So, the buffering continues.

More Netflix.

More social media.

More food.

More alcohol.

More. More. More.

What’s the antidote?

The antidote to the general hastiness of life comes down to two things: embracing quiet and slowing down.

Quiet

As much as self-help gurus would like us to believe it, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to quieting the mind. For some, the mere thought of an eyes-closed, listening to Tibetan wind chimes is claustrophobic. I find quiet in long runs. There’s a point when my body is so tired that all I can really focus on is breathing and putting one foot in front of the other. All the other noise dissipates.

The hardest part of finding your quiet is giving yourself the space and time to do it. Danielle Bernock suggests finding just one minute to silence all distractions or move to a place where you can’t hear them, close your eyes, and breathe. Just for one minute.

You owe it to yourself to put in the work necessary to figure out what helps you find inner calm.

In Anthropology of an American Girl, author Hilary Thayer Hamann writes:

The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise.

Don’t let Hamann derail your efforts though. Finding quiet is inseparably coupled with our second step:

Slowing down

Like finding inner calm, this one can be difficult. There aren’t many places where the general hastiness of life shows up more than for those who are the primary caregivers to the young, the elderly, or the infirm.

The usual systemic subjects rear their ugly heads here, and forcefully. The number of societies that provide strong support groups as the standard are diminishing.

Even so, it is possible to be intentional about how we approach certain things. Speeding in a car, for example, endangers your life and the lives of others and saves you almost no time when you’re speeding across town, particularly since you end up waiting at the same stoplights as the people you’re speeding past.*

This next suggestion is as much for me as anyone since I tend to hurry through meals as though I’m trying to eat everything in sight before a hungry lion comes along to eat me and my leftovers. Between bites of food, put down your utensil or food. Enjoy the flavor and texture of the food between bites.

Since eating is an activity that’s done multiple times a day every day, it’s a perfect place to practice slowing down because of the quantity and quality of opportunities.

Overcoming hastiness and overwhelm requires effort and deliberate practice. I’ve been digging a giant hole of hastiness and overwhelm for myself for more than twenty years. I’ve come to realize that it will take a long time (perhaps another decade) to use what I’ve learned to become more intentional about life and fill in the void.

After all, the point of life is not to see how much I can get done but to live.

Thanks for reading!

*I recognize this is not the best example since driving can be quite stressful for so many people.