I’m a GenXer, born exactly 50 years ago. I am adept with my smart phone, and enjoy digital communication with my family who live abroad because of the miracle of streaming and satellites and such. But also I remember phone line operators speaking without bodies like annoyed ghosts, only using 4 digit phone numbers in my grandparents’ rural home town, and the now totally foreign sensation of one family having one phone secured to one room. This held a sense of something more solid and intentional in communication that I find I miss. Less chaotic and urgent.
The answering machine changed things again, but even that could be removed from the tyranny of the immediate when a tape failed, or a message got erased, or it simply took the time it took to go through the messages in the order received.
Once digital voice mail became the norm, the entire timetable shrank and instant access became the expectation of many.
I know many of my friends and colleagues in corporate America feel harried by their devices, hounded. They are offered constant arrays of time management seminars and boundary setting workshops as if the problem here were theirs alone, and not a grinding system that demands all now.
But this is not a work-life balance issue, or even a critique of the frenzied pace of many workplaces. This is a pushback against the normalcy of immediacy, surely a new concept in human life development. We have never before been *able* to act, speak, respond instantly, or nearly so.
And so we think we should at all times. Because we can.
But as any child running too fast at the pool can tell you, a tiny unseen obstacle can cause disaster. A pebble, a lost flip flop, a stray floatie will flip you off your path and into the water if lucky, the pool deck if not.
We can’t see what we speed by, we can’t hear what we don’t listen for. We exclude crucial actors in communities, because their presence wasn’t obvious right away. We drop many offered lines of communication when we insist there is only one.
I think we succumb easily to the tyranny of the immediate, the urgent, and we feed dangerous loops of panic and poor problem solving in order to come up with a fix, any decent fix.
Occasionally, we encounter true disaster situations, or crisis triage. It does happen. Every once in a while, extreme action is necessary and must happen right now. A flood, a fire, a global pandemic.
But it has been my experience that well meaning people answer a huge problem or deep injustice with panic and urgency. We have been badly conditioned to believe that the immediate is better than the delayed, the fast superior to the slow.
I say badly conditioned not just because it is terrible behaviorism, but because it can be broken by something as simple as breath, a pause. A positive punishment as behaviorists would say, to breathe through the urgent is to add an action that ends a foolhardy response. Our allegiance to urgency can be broken by stopping just a little bit more often and staying still.
What is needed in order to hear and heal, to bridge and reconcile, to construct and innovate is time, a slower pace. Deep breaths. Broader tables with more food and fewer agendas. More silence.
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I am reminded of the wisdom of Fred Rogers as I hum his song while typing, “I Like to Take My Time.” And some of the solution to our existential fears and senses of panic is simply to slow down more often.
But we do so in order not only to avoid the pebbles with their crashes, but also to hear what we haven’t heard. We slow down to see what we’ve missed, to find allies we had ignored and build relationships where none exist, to walk alongside those already doing the work. We slow down to pick up the lines of communication that exist all around us, but that don’t leave voice mail.