This Week's Mindful Morsel 🍪 | April 16, 2025 — Out with Urgency; In with Possibility
photo by Jordan Benton on Pexels
Happy good Wednesday đź’ś
About 2 months ago, I wrote to you about divorcing urgency from action — how living in a constant state of urgency enables an endless state of stress in our bodies.
In that same letter, I suggested taking a few minutes to literally do nothing when you can. Has that been going anywhere for you? I hope it has at least sprouted some seeds.
And if you’re like me, you might also be wondering how to stretch out the vibe of this experience in your everyday living off the mat. We still live in a society where things need done, usually on a schedule. So how are you moving through those things?
One of my most frequent urgent experiences in a day is trying to get out the door to get my daughter to school on time. I’m constantly checking time and trying new things to streamline, and I feel like a crazy whirlwind trying to go through my checklists while I regulate so I’m not behaving like a big ol’ mean mom about it.
But just this morning we were running behind, and I told her not to put on her coat. I didn’t give her an opportunity to loosen her own shoes. I nearly completely took over and used statements that felt like orders rather than guidance. All to save mere seconds — I hate these moments.
When experiences like this happen, I feel all squished like a mostly-used tube of toothpaste — all condensed at the bottom and brimming to explode at the top. I feel a tremendous amount of tension in my shoulders, neck, and jaw. My hyperfocus mode kicks on toward one goal: getting in the car. Everything else blurs into the far distant edges in this extreme version of tunnel vision.
A few days ago, I came across this passage in Returning Home to Our Bodies by Abigail Rose Clarke: “Slowing down, on purpose, brings me back to the wide world full of possibility rather than the narrow tight fear that urgency would have me constrict myself into.”
In moments like this morning, there’s no room for anything else. No room for whimsy or laughter. No room for breathing or ease. There is so much pressure from the urgency that there is no possibility for anything else.
In contrast, on days when I don’t experience this urgency, we have smiles on our faces, we joke, we sing, we dance — we are much more jovial and soft in heart and spirit. It feels wider to me, like we can take up more space, and isn’t that what opening to possibility feels like?
But it’s a big step between intellectually knowing that and knowing that in your body.
We’re like these living nesting dolls of urgency, buried in container after container – each reinforcing the drive to go faster, squeezing our essence smaller and smaller until it seems like a tired old joke.
photo by Ron Lach on Pexels
​Can you picture yourself like that or get a sense of it? Imagine what could happen if even just one of those nesting containers broke wide open?
The idea of that feels so good in my body. It feels like even distribution and room to breathe. Like I’m not so concentrated in such a small area of my body. What about you?
I can picture us with a little extra swagger in our step. A little extra crinkle around our eyes as we genuinely smile. A little slower in our breath. Because we’re not so hurried. Not whizzing by the world.
Possibility – the land of hopes and dreams – can thrive when urgency isn’t behind the wheel all the time. May we dream up some possibilities together as we soften urgency’s extractive grip.
Brewing hopeful whimsy,
