Busy or Hurried: How Can We Tell?

So how do we know if our lives are hurried or just busy?

Ortberg suggests a few diagnostic criteria.

Do we constantly speed up daily activities?

Do we feel impatient whenever we have to wait, at a stoplight, in the grocery line?

Do we find ourselves constantly frustrated with others who don’t seem as rushed as we are?

There was a brief period of time a few years into our marriage, where my husband and I worked as temps for the same large company. We were able to overlap our lunch hours, but since we worked on opposite sides of the building we had to hurry to meet up and then rush to the cafeteria so we had as much time as possible to spend together before rushing back to our desks. Since we were both temps, we had to keep accurate time cards and if we took too long a lunch, we didn’t get paid.

Nothing was more frustrating than being behind a throng of people headed back to their various departments and rows of cubicles who didn’t seem to be in any hurry. They would slowly meander through the hallways, kind of veering from one side of the hall to the other, making it impossible to pass on either side.

This irritated us both because it cut into our precious time together. Now, at the time I felt justified because our time was not entirely our own, and because my husband was also a full-time student, sometimes that lunch break together was the only time I saw him. We weren’t even able to commute together because he had to leave directly from work to go to class.

In retrospect, I would should have been more chill about the whole thing, just being grateful for the time I had, but I was always trying to squeeze just a few extra seconds out of that little bubble of quality time together and not leaving enough time to get back to my desk and invariably I would encounter a person like the one I described earlier. Someone who was clearly in no hurry at all, who was getting in my way.

Are we often multi-tasking?

Talking on the phone or texting while driving, trying to hold a conversation while also reading articles on our phones. Making dinner while helping our children with their homework.

Not all multitasking is bad. The larger question is why we feel the constant need to do so. I find that I multitask so often that if I am only doing one thing, I feel as though I should be working more efficiently and that I’m somehow, wasting my time by not accomplishing more at one time!

But I’ll also be the first to admit, that it is very difficult to truly do one more than one thing well. I think I can check my email and listen to my husband talk about his day, but I really can’t. I think I can listen to a podcast while I write, also not a good idea. I can listen to certain kinds of music when I read, but I can’t have words of any kind or I quickly find myself distracted and off track.

We think that when we combine tasks we are more efficient, but often the opposite is true. Click To Tweet

Clutter can be a symptom of a hurried life. We buy things we don’t have the time to use, nor the time to get rid of. Some of us have accumulated so much stuff but we don’t have the time or energy to figure out what to do with it, so we just keep moving it around, reorganizing it, and tripping over it rather than actually dealing with it.

Richard Foster said “Superficiality is the curse of our age.”

We have so much to watch, and read, that we find ourselves having a cursory knowledge of many things, but deeply understand little. We fear missing out.

FOMO is real! It’s what keeps us from committing to a sport, a book, a movie, a favorite restaurant, or even a relationship. The fear of what else is out there keeps us from fully knowing and engaging with any individual topic.

Ortberg says “We have traded wisdom for information. We have exchanged depth for breadth. We want to microwave maturity.”

Superficiality in relationship leads to one of, what I think, is the saddest symptoms of hurry sickness, an inability to love.

Love and hurry are incompatible. Because love takes time and when you live life at a breakneck pace, time is something you simply don’t have. Click To Tweet

We often suffer from what Ortberg calls Sunset Fatigue. The people we claim to love most, get the leftovers at the end of the day. The world has taken its pound of flesh and when the day is done, we find ourselves with little left to give our families.

Bedtime hour is the crazy hour in our family. By the end of the day, I am just about done and instead of bedtime being filled with tender moments, more often than not, it’s punctuated by harsh words and tears.

Some of that is my own selfishness. It’s been a long day and I want to hurry up and get them into bed so I can have some me-time. But another component is simply that I have been rushing all day from one task to another and now that there is no reason to rush, I don’t know how to slow down.

Does anyone else have the experience of feeling exhausted all through the evening and then when you finally lay down, shut off the tech and the lights, you can’t get to sleep?

We rush so much that we no longer know how to cease and be still, even when our bodies need it. Click To Tweet

Hurry prevents us from receiving love from the Father and giving it to his children. Going back to what I said in last week’s post, Jesus, while often busy, never hurried. So if we want to become more like Jesus, which is essentially the goal of the Christian life, we must be willing to ruthlessly eliminate hurry.

Ortberg says “By definition, we can’t move faster than the one we are following.”

This is the second in a series of upcoming blog posts on living an unhurried life. You can find the first post here.

I actually wrote this over a year ago as a teacher for our church’s Wednesday night adult class. Bear with me as I figure out how to best share this important area for growth that the majority of us need in our spiritual lives.