The current (or curse) of urgency
photo taken at Santa Clara 1728 Lisboa, Portugal
December 21, 2025
Seems like I’ve spent the better part of this year with my head cocked, listening. That’s the best way I can describe it. My modus operandi, strip everything back to the absolute essentials. Friendship. Food. Partnership. Community. Nature. I wish everyone or everything would shut up so I can listen to what, I have no idea. It’s not even my ears that are trying to listen. It’s my whole body.
What has consistently emerged is a radical commitment to simplicity and silence. Silence, the calm quiet that comes when fear has lost its voice. Simplicity, the unabashed joy and laughter of being oneself while gathered in communion.
With these shortened days I keep the candles lit. Not so much as a homage to the time or season (though it’s conveniently a good time for that too), but that I may sit down and take in the light that is emitted, and swim in the silence.
Urgency is a Curse
In the current climate, one doesn’t have to look far afield to experience the seismic grip of urgency. Consider this, what if you didn’t need to be rushed or pushed or made to believe what you have isn’t enough?Where have you learned what urgency serves? Are you stuck in its undertow?
The relentless attitude of urgency is in opposition to what my body knows and likes. When urgency falls away, I luxuriate in time. There’s an abundance of it. Just like there’s an abundance of resources, ideas, space, ways of doing things, or ways to reach out and connect with something or someone. This one way, the urgent way, that so many of us have bought into, has perilous effects. It can be the fuel which keeps the mind narrow. The force which dislodges the bio-psycho-spiritual linchpin of equanimity. When I recognize myself spinning like a top, thrashing and reaching for more, I take a moment. I wait for the dizziness to stop. I ask all of me to come home and release anything that’s not love. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
What my heart inherently knows and wants is a spreading slowness; the great void where urgency has no purchase. Slow to let my mind drift into wonder. Slow to move through tasks, both necessary and mundane. Slow to feel relaxed rather than anxious or fearful that how or what I’m doing will work, make sense, or ‘deliver’. Slow to have the ability to observe, sense, and digest even the smallest of life’s experiences. Slow to move in and out the climates of my ego.
Slow is powerful. Slow is spacious.
It’s a place to keep creativity intact as well as my nervous system ignited, lucid, and steady. It’s a way that I can practice dropping the proverbial load. I step away and attempt to remain still amongst a sea of over-doers, over-achievers, and urgent matters that, well, aren’t that urgent.
Cosmic Beats and The Soul’s Voice
Today punctuates a rhythmic point on the northern hemisphere’s agreed upon calendar—the winter solstice. It’s a moment that has already come and gone. Like one note nested within a song, the saturated shadow of sand left after a wave is sucked out to sea, or a satisfying inhale immediately followed by an extended exhale. I find these marked celestial days interesting. They are cyclical, perpetual yet we isolate them. Preserving static separation at all costs. It’s as if we want them frozen, to be neatly and deliberately contained, afraid of what will happen if it all starts melting. Why do we limit the celebration of darkness or light’s return to just one day?
As light beings, I think we have the ability and capacity to do our own light work. In the coming weeks (really anytime), especially if you turn and see urgency running towards you, stop. Listen with your whole body. Listen with your heart.
There’s a practice called soul-voice meditation. I don’t take credit for the name or the method. Shout out to the beloved Meggan Watterson. She’s also where I discovered those who called themselves Hesychasts. Stillness devotees who, in seeking the treasures of the heart would curl their bodies forward, in what I can only imagine would be a slightly uncomfortable somatic gesture of contemplation, for the sake of expansion. They’d focus their attention deep within. And go deeper still, in order to be in the presence and freedom of love.
I’ve practiced some form of contemplation for most of my life. As a child, even a young adult, I didn’t have the words for my revolt against urgency. Sometimes boredom or reverie or play are mislabeled when in fact they are simply clear and direct avenues to places of still, silent rest.
Instead of curling over, I honor my physical body and sit with my spine straight. I drop in and down and imagine myself listening to the soul voice of my heart. There are moments when I experience spaciousness and effulgence. And like the solstice, it’s here and then, not. Yet the heart, that valiant space which radiates with invisible light, full of tenderness and without urgency, is the place I’m wanting to occupy more often.
Keep the candles lit my friend, may you sit in the dark and share in the light that is emitted.
Yours, Erin