Urgency

At one community meeting, we ran into a high-conflict issue. We ran out of time and agreed to postpone this issue until the following week. All week, emotions ran high and opposing views intensified. We eagerly assembled at the next meeting, inpatient to get this issue resolved. This was a Quaker community-each meeting began with five minutes of silence. On this day, the clerk announced that, due to the intensity of this issue, we would not begin with our usual five minutes of silence. We all breathed a sigh of relief, only to hear her announce: "Today, we'll begin with 20 minutes of silence."
Story told by Parker Palmer


Urgency is the unavoidable companion of crisis. It seems to be a valuable relationship--crisis demand immediate attention and response. Often, the more we know about a situation, the more urgent we become. We have to do something now! Our concern and love needs to be instantly translated into action, otherwise it will seem we don't care.

When we work from this place of urgency, we set ourselves up for failure. We work very hard, push our agenda, get aggressive when we think we need to, and end up more exhausted than effective.

And we get angry. Anyone who doesn't respond immediately becomes our enemy... Captured by a sense of urgency, we create categories--those for and against us, those who get it, those who don't. This is the predictable cycle of urgency. Because we can't wait, we fall into bad behavior: we proceed full force, shoving people out of the way, ignoring signals...

STOP.

Urgency leads nowhere except into the wilderness of aggression and failure. It doesn't serve our cause. It doesn't serve anything.

From the book "Perseverance". By Margaret Wheatley