Urgent Wisdom Is Slow

How pausing and resting improve connection and communication

Photo by stefan moertl on Unsplash

If you’re into cooking, you know that time is crucial for good-tasting food. Grilling? The chicken will taste better if it has time to marinate. Making lasagna? Chances are it comes together after it’s been sitting in the fridge for a day. So too with writing.

Good ideas take time. They don’t just pour from my fingertips onto the page. On the contrary, the first version of something I write is pretty terrible. Careful thinking isn’t spur of the moment, even though many people are praised for their ability to “think on their feet.” That’s a super important skill for some situations. But here at CommuniKate, I’m not responding to a new crisis. I’m not informing people about late-breaking developments that they need to know about right away. Instead, I want to build relationships with you, and support you in building relationships with others, that help us all shift cultural dynamics. Those relational shifts take time.

When I was a beginning teacher, I took several pedagogy classes. One week, we were learning about what to do during charged moments in our classrooms. How should we respond when a student said something challenging, troubling, outrageous, or especially poignant in class? What should we do when classroom discussion turned into conflict? As my peers and I brainstormed ideas, the more experienced teacher who was leading us pointed out that we had a sense of urgency. We assumed that we needed to have the right response, immediately. The more experienced teacher reminded us that it’s OK to pause. To have the class take a short break. To let the class know that the issue needed more attention, and that the conversation would continue after the break. Maybe we could even return to the issue during the next class. That pause would give us time, as teachers, to consult with our peers, to think the situation through carefully, and then to dive back into the discussion better prepared to lead and facilitate.

This technique has served me well many times in my classrooms. It reminds me that teaching and learning are ongoing processes, not something that happens instantly. Learning rarely occurs because of just one, on-the-spot response from a teacher. Even better, taking a pause models the conflict skills most Communication Studies experts hope everyone will learn.

In many heated conversations, the people involved can support their relationship by taking a break. During that time, they can calm their nervous systems, reflect a bit, and then continue resolving the conflict from a less amped up place. Just as in teaching, though, it’s important not to walk away without saying something. Instead, let your friend, neighbor, lover, coworker, or family member know that you want to resolve the issue, and that you need to rest first. Let them know when you’ll be able to continue. Even better, people in conflict can together make those decisions about when to pause and when to reconvene. (And “when” need not be defined by a specific time on the clock.)

These pauses matter because people are most likely to say hurtful and harmful things when they are dysregulated, triggered, or flooded with unprocessed emotion. In that state of overwhelm, it’s hard to be connected and caring. Instead, people often deflect, defend, blame, shame, judge, and lash out. Slowness creates space to stay attuned to oneself and others. It makes vulnerability more possible.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

But going slower can be uncomfortable and inconvenient, especially in a culture that prizes efficiency, productivity, and getting things done. A couple years ago, a friend of mine shared a story about her son. He was about four years old, and he wanted to help her with everything, especially cooking. My friend and I laughed together about what “helping” meant: making incredible messes; getting food all over the floor and the walls and sometimes the ceiling and everywhere else other than the necessary pots and pans; putting way too much of an ingredient into a dish so that it was inedible. Preparing the family’s meals became anything but straightforward, and it was not an exercise in efficiency. But on the days when there was time, my friend encouraged her son to help. She let him make mistakes and messes, knowing that he was learning. She provided guidance and stepped in when necessary to keep him from starting fires or burning himself. Dinner took a long time.

It's understandable that any of us, including me, sometimes just want to get right to the metaphorical food. Especially if we haven’t had enough of it or the other things we need. But sometimes we’ve learned to apply urgency when it’s not necessary, and in those moments, we lose something. In our hurry to get things done or to solve a problem, we forget to connect. We neglect to attune to ourselves and one to another, and so we miss the real issue. It gets hidden beneath our own reactivity.

Instead of addressing what’s really going on, the conflict stays at the surface level. We can’t access or acknowledge the deeper need that drives it. Often, fear is in the way—fear that the real need won’t be seen or met, or that the need is unreasonable. So instead of working with that fear, we block it by refusing to show the underlying need, fear, or desire to ourselves and others. We stop listening, and in so doing, we turn each other into monsters who cannot respond with care because we don’t really know ourselves or each other.

Urgency teaches people to tune out and to override bodily wisdom. Yet ignoring one’s felt knowledge is both normal and celebrated in dominant US cultures. In these contexts, learning to listen to the body can be so hard. It can be nearly impossible to notice the body’s ebbs and flows; to know when it is energetic, social, tired, overjoyed, overwhelmed, or scared; to pay attention to when it wants to move and when it wants to be still. Slowness can be a way to honor the body. Slowness can be a way to practice returning to what the body already knows. Bodies know when pauses and rest are needed. I need to rest sometimes. Everybody does.

But, as I’ve written about elsewhere, rest is unevenly accessible. So many wise people, both scholars and activists, make this claim. In some cultures, rest is equated with laziness and vigorously shamed. That shaming contrasts with so many religious and spiritual traditions that emphasize the value of rest alongside work, repose in combination with labor. So many of us internalize the value of work and labor while negatively judging the rest and repose, despite its holiness. We coerce ourselves and others into keeping on going when we need to stop.

Many of us don’t have an option. We parent alone or together in systems and communities that do not allow for time away. We work multiple jobs to make ends meet, none of which allow for sick time or bereavement time or time to tend to our mental health. The scarcity and greed that guides so many economic, political, and (anti)relational systems means that, for so many people, meeting basic needs is urgent.

For these reasons, both urgency and the lack thereof can threaten equity.

Urgency Threatens Equity

Strict and rigid uses of time support systemic racism, and urgency is a problematic feature of whiteness culture. These inflexible approaches to time get baked into workplaces. Many communities challenge these dominant understandings of time: crip time, queer time, and trauma time all offer malleable, less rigid, nonlinear approaches. And Hersey’s work at The Nap Ministry and in Rest as Resistance reclaims time to upend ongoing and historical racism and misogyny. These communities, scholars, and activists share the assumption that accessibility, justice, and equity increase when the drumbeat of now now now softens.

That sense of now now now is far from inevitable. As I wrote about in an earlier post, the field of Communication Studies—my own intellectual and scholarly home—assumes that people create meaning through interaction. For that reason, what something means can change. Experts in organizations know well that the meaning of time is created through human interaction, and it varies by culture. All our lifetimes are finite, but that need not mean time is scarce. And it need not mean that our actions must be feverish. Urgency has never been universal.

Standardized time is a relatively recent phenomenon. It came about with the advent of the railroad system. People in Chicago, for example, needed to know when to expect the train with goods from New York. And so, to organize across distances, people developed an agreement about a predictable, consistent way to understand time. They used it to coordinate their actions so that they could achieve shared goals. Let me offer a nerdy tangent here: Some of the earliest theories of communication were built around the idea of moving information from one place to the next, much like the train moves food or other products from one city to another. Indeed, this understanding of communication as akin to transportation still appears in many contemporary communication theories. Digressions aside, how people understand time is directly connected to how people communicate.

The development of standardized time ushered in a worldwide shift. In the pre-industrial era, most work aligned with the season and the needs of the task. For farmers, the crop had to be planted, tended, and harvested at particular times of year, and people labored until those activities were done. Work started and ended based on how long it took to accomplish something. Scholars call this task time. Once the industrial era began, and standardized time become the norm, most work shifted to what’s known as clock time: work begins and ends based on the hours and minutes on the clock, and workers are expected to do as much as possible, as fast as possible, during that arbitrarily determined timeframe. As this shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy happened, workers increasingly labored in factories and on assembly lines. Managers harnessed clock time and increased the speed of the assembly line to grow their company’s profit. Workers quickly organized themselves to slow the rate of production, refusing to do more work for the same pay. This tradition of resisting urgency persists to this day.

If you enjoy art or visual representations of ideas, you might take a look at Magritte’s 1938 painting called “Time Transfixed.” It shows the living room in someone’s home. On the mantle sits an analogue clock in front of a mirror. And instead of a fire, a train protrudes out of the fireplace, directly into the room. The train’s smoke billows up the chimney. This isn’t any living room though. It’s relatively fancy, the home of a person with some wealth. Though there’s something thoroughly surreal about the image—we all know trains don’t belong in fireplaces—the image also reflects something realistic about the changes happening during the early 1900s. The new way of understanding time shaped the most mundane and intimate corners of people’s lives. It changed the rhythms of not only our work, but also our relationships. The legacy of that cultural shift lives on when urgency to solve a problem or finish a job overrides care for our human needs.

Lack of Urgency Threatens Equity

As I mentioned earlier, it’s not always possible to go slow in a culture of speed. Structural barriers distribute slowness unevenly, so much so that many people have written about slowness as an unearned advantage that only some people can enjoy. Some calls to slow down keep oppressive, violent, and abusive systems in place. Slowness, by itself, is not some moral virtue.

When people demand change and justice from those with more power, the powerful regularly respond with not now, not yet, slow down, calm down, sit down, shut up, go home. These refrains hush the voices necessary for transformation, and they stop people from disrupting inequity. That’s not the version of slowness I’m interested in.

Urgency, by itself, is neither simply good nor bad. Instead, it is far more complicated. Here are two brief stories that show some of these complexities.

In the early 20^th century, Henry Ford advocated for the 40-hour, 5-day work week. He did so at a time in US history when working 60 hours a week was the norm. Most people’s work during these decades was brutal and dangerous. Ford increased wages and decreased work hours, successfully lowering turnover at his car factory and improving the quality of life for his workers. The time away was useful and valuable: People working at his company were able to build community and relationships, to rest and heal. Ford’s approach was one starting point for labor laws that exist today and protect workers from some exploitation. But Ford’s motivations were far from altruistic. Ford wanted workers at his factory to buy and use the cars they were making. His employees would have no need for the automobiles if they worked all the time. By decreasing work hours and increasing wages, Ford created demand for a product that would transform global life and make him incredibly wealthy. To increase people’s urgency to get somewhere fast, Ford slowed work.

In yet another one of urgency’s complexities, when people become conscious of their long-standing lack of urgency, they sometimes take quick action that creates harm. Men who have been insulated from gender-based violence, upon awakening to its reality, will rush to offer simple fixes that betray some ignorance. Similarly, many people who do not understand relational violence will simply urge a person in an abusive relationship to leave, sometimes chastising them if they do not. These well-meaning onlookers don’t yet know that leaving is the most dangerous time. If someone decides to leave safely, they usually plan carefully. These same patterns show up around race. White people who are just coming into awareness of systemic racism often insist on doing something immediately. Although anti-racist action is crucial, especially in contrast to generations of white silence and inaction, uninformed action can make things worse and perpetuate racist dynamics. Instead of listening, paying attention, and following the leadership of more experienced and wise people, white people often think we know better. Regardless of the type of inequity, as people begin learning about its violence, we often forget to be students and learners. So we act out and act up in ways that are more about an urgent need to make ourselves feel better rather than about actually stopping violent relational patterns and dismantling the systems that support such violence.

In difficult political times, urgency will sometimes be necessary. Such action can block the worst of violence. But urgency rarely builds something different. It cannot intentionally walk us all toward what’s next. Building happens from a calm, joyful, passionate, embodied place of wisdom. And that wisdom cannot be rushed. It arrives when it is ready. It pays attention to the tides and the stars. It does not abide the ticking clock.  

What’s Next?

For those familiar with the Substack platform, you may know that it’s pretty normal for posts to occur at least once a week for any given newsletter. For now, that won’t be happening for me! I resonate with the work of fellow scholars who are approaching Substack at a “slow” pace, and so I’ll be writing at a rate that’s sustainable for me. Please stay tuned for once monthly posts.

You can count on these posts to be consistent and carefully considered. I often pour over my writing for months before publishing. And none of the ideas are brand new ones. They’ve often been cooking for years and years. That doesn’t mean I’ve got everything sorted out or the recipe perfected. But it does mean that I’m laboring without burning out, and that I’m not offering knee-jerk reactions to the latest cultural flashpoint. (Shout out to the amazing journalists and scholars who have the skill, care, and training to provide thoughtful and nuanced immediate responses to current events!) If you’ve found this post useful, please share it with someone else!

Next month, on December 16, I’ll be posting about how violence and communication are connected, including some communication skills anyone can use to reduce violence.

As always, if you’d like to support CommuniKate with Kate Lockwood Harris, please subscribe, like, share, or comment on this post. Thank you!