BEAUTIFUL URGENCY

“Play with a sense of urgency,” people are saying to the Lakers who happen to be on a 3-game losing streak. Tonight they host Toronto in hopes of stopping the bleeding. There’s a logic concerning urgency, however, which says that it is accompanied by crisis. And invariably, crisis is usually assumed to be the spark igniting passionate performance. Scratch the word performance since it sounds a bit superficial. How about saying, “crisis is usually assumed to be the spark that ignites a desperate fight to preserve, stem the tide and/or rally?” If there’s urgency, there’s a stimulus of dire proportion. When it’s urgent, it’s right now, immediate, shot to the top of whatever priority list you’ve written on you Blackberry or other smart device.

So in keeping with the logic that crisis and urgency are blood brothers, is it possible to live life as a conscientious objector to both? Do we evade the “c” word because its presence promulgates the existence of its kin known as urgency? It seems like we fear urgency. How can you tell? For starters, we have trouble identifying the crisis that precedes it. Am I the only one who California rolls through the life’s stop signs sometimes or all the time ignoring the warnings and admonitions that can save us? If you’re a teacher in high schools public and private you know well the difficulty of transferring wisdom to students who experiment with drugs to the tune of addiction by age fourteen. There’s disease, general apathy, mythical worldviews concerning what it takes to survive in the real world and a host of other characteristics that would indicate crisis. And lest we pick only on our youth, adults have playgrounds too that accentuate the notion that they too are slaves to escapism. And we adults are probably the best at rationalizing because we’ve earned our indulgences right?

But crises continue to loom don’t they and they aren’t limited to the third world. While aid to Haiti and Chile are rightful, the family deserves urgent care. Isn’t it important to rest and not work 8 days a week? Don’t we see the small window of time we have to impact our sons and daughters as they speed toward adolescence and adulthood? Are we really still smoking cigarettes with all we know of its ills (nothing pesonal if you “chief”)? Crisis is all around isn’t it and it would be alarming except that we have the ability to effect change that can remedy it. It’s a power reserved for humankind. How much fun it would be to stop hittin’ the snooze and get up thinking of not whether there is need for my urgent efforts but  rather where I will deploy them.