The Paradox of Urgency

The older I get, the faster time seems to move.

It’s a paradoxical feeling. The days themselves often feel long while I’m living them, but somehow I blink, and suddenly we’re halfway through the year. I find myself wondering where the time went.

In my younger years, I couldn’t wait to grow up. I had this innate feeling that the older I got, the better my life would become. I still feel like that’s true; maybe that’s the Capricorn in me.

But now, I’m also mourning a youth spent grasping at the future rather than enjoying the present.

Now, in my mid-twenties, I feel so young, but also like time is rapidly slipping from me. I thought I’d be further along in life than I am. I thought I’d be established in a career, have a core friend group like Joan and Toni from Girlfriends, maybe even be in a committed relationship, preparing for the future with a partner and a few dogs.

Life now is not what I imagined it would be, but I’m grateful nonetheless.

For the first time in my life, I feel a profound sense of urgency. Not panic or chaos, but an internal pull to move quickly with strong vision, direction and purpose.

Growing up, much of my urgency was prompted by deadlines, time limits and schedules. I kept a packed calendar full of cello lessons, sports, musical theater, school clubs, volunteer work and part-time jobs. My schedule was so tight that I had no choice but to stay on task. If I dropped one thing, it felt like it would all crumble. I never wanted to let anyone down, be late, miss a deadline, slack on my part of a group project or miss a night out with friends. And I never did.

I always seemed to be rushing, whether it was my mom pushing us out the door in the morning to get to school and work on time, or me hustling from choreography rehearsal for my school’s production of Footloose to make it to track practice, where I needed to lead a run as the long-distance captain.

The pace was always at a ten.

After graduating from Occidental College, I was exhausted—physically, emotionally and mentally. All I wanted was to slow down. I told myself I’d completed twenty-two years of hard, fast and demanding work, and that I deserved a break.

I was on my own in Los Angeles, living in an apartment with my best friend and my dog. All of my family was back on the East Coast. The world was at my fingertips.

I worked a lot. I tried corporate life and dreaded it, though the structure and pay offered stability. I picked up odd jobs and freelance work, chasing income that didn’t require me to commit to anyone’s nine-to-five but my own. I did a little modeling, booking paid gigs maybe once or twice a month, if I was lucky. I worked as a veterinary assistant, often overworked and underpaid, but grateful for an environment I loved despite the exhaustion. I became a podcast editor for a nonprofit, a freelance gig I could work around my own hours as long as I hit the deadline. None of it asked much of my schedule. That was the point. I wanted my time to stay mine.

For the first time in my life, my schedule was completely my own, and I loved it. I could go to sleep as early or as late as I wanted, take a nap in the middle of the day if I needed one, eat whatever I pleased and, maybe least beneficially, smoke weed whenever I wanted and as often as I wanted.

I had money, time and freedom.

After years of strict schedules, this was a lovely change of pace that I felt I needed and thoroughly enjoyed. But enjoyment very quickly became overindulgence. In the blink of an eye, four years passed without much to show for them.

Smoking weed was a coping mechanism for me. My altered state of mind helped time slow down, which in turn eased my anxieties, worries and fears. It helped me sleep. It helped me eat. It helped me relax. But somewhere along the way, I went from only being able to smoke a puff or two to craving several joints a day. The more I smoked, the more of my energy, time and money that I had previously used for productive, life-giving things went toward finding the best dispensary, learning how to roll, searching for cool places to smoke or acquiring fun snacks to eat afterward.

Slowly, that freedom became its own kind of confinement.

Of course, that’s not all I did during those four years, but it’s what I usually turned to whenever I had a free moment, and I didn’t put much real effort into building something lasting for myself. With the illusion of a slower clock, I found a sense of comfort—a false peace—but also a fear of not living up to my potential, of becoming a loser.

From the outside, I had a lot going for myself—a job, a car, my own place, good friends, a modeling contract. Internally, I wasn’t satisfied.

I knew younger me would be disappointed.

By the time I turned 25, I went full “quarter-life crisis.” I couldn’t make excuses anymore. I refused to remain stagnant. At long last, I started putting effort into building something more meaningful, even if it was just myself to start.

Over the course of that year, I got a gym membership, committed to a schedule, stopped smoking, stopped drinking and started making different decisions. I even started going to church for the first time and eventually got baptized.

It’s not to say that as soon as I turned 25, my life suddenly became perfect or exactly how I wanted it. There were times I slipped back into old patterns and familiar comforts, especially smoking. But the longer I practiced staying away from these things, the easier it became.

Ultimately, the way I’ve been able to leave some of the more damaging things behind was simply saying to myself, “That’s not who I am anymore.” When I was able to separate my identity from those habits, everything got easier. It’s who I used to be. It’s not who I am anymore, and it’s not who I want to be in the future either.

Now, I have a clear mind and an intense focus. Where I used to pour that energy into negative habits to cope with difficult emotions, I now try to channel it into things that actually build me up—the gym, a walk outside, calling a family member to catch up, working on my business or writing this essay.

The gym, especially, has become a place where I practice being present rather than trying to escape it. Not long ago, I was stressed and overwhelmed with everything I had to do, almost frozen by not knowing where to start. On top of that, a conflict with a friend was taking up a lot of mental space. I wanted the familiar comfort of smoking and sitting at the beach with some good food. Instead, I went to the gym.

I couldn’t think my way out of the moment, so I had to be in it. I moved my body, listened to what it needed and let the rest wait. There is no way to rush my body into becoming stronger. I have to meet myself where I am that day, do the work in front of me and trust that, over time, it will add up to something. I’m realizing life works much the same way.

I think for a long time I confused urgency with discipline, but I’m realizing they aren’t exactly the same thing. Discipline governs what I do today, while urgency comes from understanding why today matters. Discipline is what gets me to follow through even when I don’t necessarily feel like it. Urgency is the bigger picture behind it, the understanding that the way I spend my days will eventually become the way I’ve spent my life.

I need both. Urgency without discipline can easily become anxiety—a frantic awareness of everything I want and how little time I seem to have to get there. But discipline without a larger sense of purpose can become a checklist, a series of things completed without much thought about what they are building toward. Having a vision for my future gives me direction, while discipline brings me back to what I can actually do about it today.

Still, there’s a contradiction in that I’m learning to hold. I began this essay mourning a youth spent grasping at the future, and now I’m talking about the highest version of myself, where I want to end up and what I need to do to get there. I don’t want to spend my whole life becoming. I am already living it.

There’s nothing wrong with looking forward to the future. I still believe the older I get, the better my life can become. I want something to strive for, to look forward to and to aim toward. But I don’t want to make the same mistake again, only this time under the guise of ambition. My current self cannot simply become a waiting room for the woman I hope to be one day.

The future can give me direction, but the present is where I actually have to live it out. Urgency, then, isn’t about rushing toward some imagined finish line. It’s about taking the life in front of me seriously enough to participate in it—to build without becoming frantic, to rest without disappearing into avoidance and to recognize that the ordinary days I’m living now are not simply preparation for my future life. They are my life.

My faith has also given me more peace in that process. I believe God places certain ideas, convictions and desires on my heart, but I’m learning that faith requires discernment. Not every impulse requires immediate action, and following what I believe God is calling me toward doesn’t mean I get to control the outcome. My responsibility is to listen, move when I feel called to move and then surrender what happens next.

That surrender is what keeps urgency from becoming the same anxiety I spent so much of my life operating under. When things don’t work out—which is bound to happen from time to time—I’m learning not to treat it as something discombobulating or world-shattering. I can try again a different way. I can change direction. I can move on.

Before, my need to hurry came from fear, which usually led to less-than-ideal results full of mistakes and inconsistency. Now, the urgency feels different. It comes from knowing that my time matters, that what I do with it matters and that I have a responsibility to make something meaningful out of the gifts and opportunities I’ve been given.

But making the most of my time doesn’t mean rushing through it. As my Jamaican father says, “Haste makes waste.” Maybe that’s the paradox of urgency. The older I get, the more aware I become of how quickly time passes, but that awareness doesn’t make me want to move frantically anymore. It makes me want to move intentionally, while still being present enough to enjoy the life I’m working so hard to build.

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