Word of Wisdom: Hurry
Photo by the author, Serengeti National Park, 2021
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” Lao Tzu
Like most parents of young children, I came to dread the “loading up” phase of any vehicular excursion with my daughters during the toddler years. What was once a simple trip down the street to the supermarket for a dozen eggs became in this stage a laborious venture involving much carrying, cajoling, bending, and lifting simply to get everyone in the car and strapped in.
And while for the kids every outing was a grand adventure, for parental units like me it was inefficiency stacked upon inefficiency, exacerbated by litanies of questions and cries, to which I found my responses becoming tenser and terser.
Additionally, I noted my speech increasingly peppered with “Hurry!” and “Hurry up!” as default demands. When it finally dawned on me how routine this was becoming during daily drop-offs and endless errands, it gave me pause. Already, my daughters were and would continue to be coming of age in a frenetic, high-speed mobile era of incessant information and continuously breaking news. How was my habit of hurriedly haranguing them adding additional anxieties in the supposed respite of their own home?
So, I desisted from demanding they hurry and, moreover, did a dive into the meaning and history of the word just to gauge how much damage I might actually have been doing.
Quite a bit, it turned out, but for the grace of God.
While we often define hurry as “to move or act quickly or with haste”, the origin of the word paints a more insidious picture. It developed in English in the 1600s to mean “commotion or agitation”, and a few decades later signified “undue haste”. Agitation—not good. Undue—not necessary and not efficient. Already I was reassessing my frequent use of the word, as well as the underlying impulses that led me to use it.
Then I dug further, and discovered our word hurry shares the same root as our word harry, which means “to consistently carry out attacks”. Both are derived from the Old English hergian, meaning “make war, lay waste, ravage, plunder”.
Yikes.
We live in a moment of human experience unlike any other. The information, the connectivity, the options, and the busy-ness of the last hundred years—let alone the last twenty—keep us constantly on, constantly vigilant, continually guarding against the next duty or emergency demanding our energy and attention. The clock alone seems to harry us most days.
And it is something that an adversary can make great use of.
Consistent attack and agitation with no reprieve will eventually wear down any soldier, let alone a civilian. And we face an adversary with many schemes and snares, who prowls seeking to devour—made all the easier after a good dose of demanding distraction.
That understanding of both the word and the challenge it represents leads us to another discovery: hurry is not about speed as such. It is not simply to go fast instead of moving slow. Rather, it is about cause, not effect—the motivation, not the movement. Hurry is not a measurement of velocity, but a marker of fear, and the response to it.
We are hurried when we feel harried by some threat to our well-being, when we sense some attack upon our peace and contentment. It was revealed to the Psalmist that in this we are like sheep, that to lie down in green pastures, we must first feel safe enough to even consider such a restful posture. As Phillip Keller wrote in his book A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23:
[Sheep] refuse to lie down unless they are free of all fear… As long as there is even the slightest suspicion of danger from [predators] the sheep stand up ready to flee for their lives… I came to realize that nothing so quieted and reassured [my] sheep as to see me [their shepherd] in the field… We live a most uncertain life… [but] He, the Christ, the Good Shepherd, is there… This gives me great consolation, repose, and rest…it is in fact in this assurance that we rest and relax.
Hurry, we come to understand, is the not presence of speed, but the absence of peace.
Thankfully, I realized this in my parenting before it was too late, before I had ingrained in my daughters that every moment of life is a race against time, filled with threats at every turn. But easing off the accelerator of my own anxious mind and heart is still a work in progress. One that requires a daily return to the presence of the Good Shepherd.
It’s particularly difficult for many of us in midlife leadership, as both the means and the metrics in our roles and industries incentivize speed, often catalyzed by FOMO, whether of the strategic or social sort. “Move fast” (whether you break things or not) is standard operating procedure.
But fast is not hurried, and it’s also not perpetual. On this note, I’ve learned a lot from the cheetahs I’ve observed on safaris. I’ve always been fascinated by these animals, the world’s fastest—able to accelerate to almost 70mph in about 3 seconds. That’s surely an attribute many of us would envy mentally and professionally, if not physically.
Yet, they can only sustain that about 30 seconds, meaning that, while they may be fast, they move fast for only a minute or two every few days. The rest of the time? Mostly sleeping, and if not that, lazing in the shade…or occasionally moving a few feet to sun themselves for a bit before retiring back to the shade to rest some more.
A frustrating pace for tourists in Land Cruisers, but a natural and necessary one for the fastest land animal, and perhaps a masterclass for us humans so desirous of effectiveness and achievement. As business leadership author Jim Collins has deduced from his research on strategy and execution, “go slow when you can, fast when you must”. Cheetahs have this principle engrained in their very DNA.
And so do we, when we live like sons of the One who is never hurried yet never late.
While a servant is driven by deadlines, dutiful demands, and the dread of deficient performance, a son is an inheritor of purpose and provision, no matter the circumstances. While an employee or hired-hand is continually hurried by the scarcity implied by contractual obligations in a complex, uncertain world, a son can rest and receive from a good Father, even when others around them perceive only enemies and anxieties.
It’s why when we’re living like a son, we can experience perfect peace, whether moving fast or slow. Unhurried, unharried, understanding that the pathway through the shadowy valley is not punishment, but a provision of greener pastures and quieter waters on the other side.
So that we can steadily guide others like a father through their canyons.
You can’t hurry love, after all. Good thing, that.