This weekend I traveled home — nearly 48 hours door to door, with an overnight stay in a hotel along the way.
In between airports, I kept myself busy writing. And I noticed something: I was checking my phone constantly.
There was no particular reason for it. I wasn’t expecting any message. But there was still a sense of urgency — a pull to check for updates, emails, social media posts.
This urgency had nothing to do with the actual situation.
I became curious, observant of the movement of my own mind — especially in the airport, where there was genuinely nothing for me to do.
What I noticed stunned me and gave me a deeper insight into the inauthenticity of how I operate in life.
The bottom line: nothing, in truth, is urgent.
So what creates this perception of urgency?
What creates this compulsion that makes it feel like I must act now — beyond all reason?
If you observe the mind closely, you’ll discover something: it leads your attention to a place where — if you act on the sense of urgency — your sense of Self, for one brief moment, becomes real when it appears.
Granting a thought or an imagined scenario the perception of reality is the mind’s way of granting existence to a Self that isn’t actually there.
It’s the perception of Self that drives the whole dynamic of the mind — constantly seeking validation, constantly working to give itself the appearance of being real.
The urgency the mind creates reveals its own design, and the inauthenticity with which it operates.
The perception of Self is running the show.
The perception of Self is this small thing that is always hiding — never revealing itself, or worse, always pretending it isn’t there at all.
It comes to life in conversation, the moment it has an audience, asserting itself by making you feel special or unique.
It comes to life in the small things you do, moment to moment.
Every Sense of Urgency Serves a False Master
It disguises itself as: “I must do this.”
Fear of missing out — FOMO — is the classic example.
I’m talking here about the impulse to act beyond reason.
If you look back at decisions in your life that were driven by a perceived sense of urgency, you’ll probably find that most of them turned out to be counterproductive.
Try This
- If you feel an urgency that you must respond to an email now…
- If you feel an urgency that you must make a decision or act now…
- If you feel an urgency that you must buy something now — a painting, a car, a stock…
- If you feel an urgency to act on something now, where it isn’t obvious the circumstances actually support that urgency…
My suggestion: stay with the urgency. Don’t act on it. See what happens.
Allow the urgency to be there. Stay with whatever discomfort it brings up, for as long as you can, without acting on it. (Don’t worry — you won’t die, and you won’t fall apart.)
What you’ll probably discover is that staying with the urgency — without acting on it — gives you a true perspective on the situation. It lets you discern what the mind has made up to seem important from what actually matters.
Chances are, with a moment of true perspective, you’ll see:
- Maybe it isn’t necessary to buy this item right now.
- Maybe the email can wait a few days, until you’ve clarified your own position.
- Maybe what you thought you were missing out on wasn’t that important after all.
- Maybe you don’t need to act on this right now — you can simply watch how it unfolds, and decide later.
This lets you make decisions based on the reality of a situation — rather than being driven by a Self seeking confirmation through a perception of reality that is, in truth, an illusion lasting only seconds.
If you live from the understanding that nothing carries real urgency (genuine emergencies aside, of course), what remains is Being — and the wisdom of Awareness Intelligence to guide you toward the next best action.
Return to Being.
True peace is found in seeing through the illusion of the mind, seeing that it has no true reality, and declining to give in to the false urgency the mind creates to engage with whatever it dishes out.
True peace is found when the mind is quiet and there is just being.
Why This Matters — Especially If You’re an Entrepreneur
This is where the observation stops being philosophy and becomes something you can use immediately.
Almost every bad business decision I’ve made — and heard other entrepreneurs describe — wasn’t made from clarity. It was made from a perception of urgency: the deal that “won’t be there tomorrow,” the reply that “must go out right now,” the pivot decided in a single anxious afternoon. The information rarely justified the speed. The urgency did.
Overwhelm, in particular, is very often just unexamined urgency compounding on itself — a dozen small “I must act now” signals firing at once, none of them actually true. When you learn to pause and stay with that pull instead of giving in to it, you often find the ten urgent things collapse into one or two that genuinely matter — and the rest can simply wait.
My suggestion is to treat with a very high level of suspicion any sense of urgency to act which does not really match the circumstances of the situation.
Work Smarter. Not Harder.
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(In Issue #5 — “Are You Serving A False Master?” — I explored this same dynamic in a different context. And in “How To Respond When Someone Is Rude Or Offensive”, I wrote about the mind simulating reality — the same mechanism at work here with urgency.)
With awareness,
Louis MD, Founder — Awareness Intelligence
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