Hurry

After having read the extract below from Ann Voskamp's book, One Thousand Gifts, I kept realising I was yet again in a hurrying mode (this seems to be my default setting so much of the time). It meant I was able to tell myself to chill out, slow down and enjoy the now- especially during home schooling when I'm always thinking of all that I need to get through, rather than attempting to enjoy it and let the children savour the moment. 

What was the pastor’s most profound regret in life?

Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing…. Through all that haste I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away.

In our rushing, bulls in china shops, we break our own lives.

Haste makes waste.

That is the way I have lived. From the time the alarm first rings and I stir on our pillows...check those relentless hands keeping time on that clock. The time, always the time, I’m an amateur trying to beat time. The six kids rouse. We race. The barn … and hurry. The breakfast … and hurry. The books, the binders … and hurry! In a world addicted to speed, I blur the moments into one unholy smear. I have done it. I do it still. Hands of the clock whip hard. So I push hard and I bark hard and I fall hard and when their wide eyes brim sadness and their chins tremble weak, I am weary and I am the thin clear skin, reflecting their fatigue, about to burst, my eyes glistening their same sheer pain.

The hurry makes us hurt.

Whatever the pace, time will keep it and there’s no outrunning it, only speeding it up and pounding the feet harder; the minutes pound faster too. Race for more and you’ll snag on time and leak empty. The longer I keep running, the longer the gash, and I drain, bleed away.

Hurry always empties a soul.