I realized recently that I’m always in a hurry. Friends who know me might find this surprising, since it doesn’t often translate to external speediness. Nonetheless, in my head it’s always “rush, rush, rush!” and everything is marked ‘urgent’. Once becoming aware of this I realized that, in addition to this mind set causing me to feel uneccessarily stressed all the time, it also contributes hugely to my lack of organization. That’s because I’m always dropping all of my belongings in a heap somewhere, or stuffing them randomly into pockets so that I don’t waste time, and can instead rush off to do my next ‘urgent’ task. While mulling this over, and looking around the internet, I came across the term hurry sickness. According to the website just linked to, “[t]he term hurry sickness was coined back in the 1950s when the cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman were researching personality types. By 1959 they had refined this to the now-classic Type A personality, a key element of which was a “harrying sense of time urgency.”
I also came across this thoughtful article about slowing down. Here’s a quote:
“People say that modern life has grown so complicated, so busy, so crowded that we have to hurry even to survive. We need not accept that idea. It is quite possible to live in the midst of a highly developed technological society and keep an easy, relaxed pace while doing a lot of hard work. We have a choice. We are not mere victims of our environment, and we don t have to go fast just because everybody else does and urges us to do it too.
Often we may not even be aware that we are hurrying. If we have lived that way all our life and been around people who hurry, it is difficult for us to see how fast everything moves. What can we compare it to? Speed becomes a habit we do not know we have.”
I think this describes my mentality- speed is a habit I don’t know I have. To become more conscious of this, I’m going to try to use my stopwatch to build in a few minutes of pause between activities. Maybe it’s ironic to use a watch to slow down, but we’ll see what happens.
posted at 16:34 on Fri, 08 Dec, 2006 |
path: /living
All material copyrighted by Jen Schellinck. All rights reserved.