Recently, I read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. This is harsh, but I found the style of the book lackluster. Trite humour and cliche quotes abounded, and more than once I worried that Chat GPT had written it.

In my not very literary opinion, the title is more original than anything within the book. It comes from a question someone asked Dallas Willard. What is the greatest enemy of spiritual growth? And that was his answer: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry.”

We all tend to hurry too much; hurry keeps us from worshipping, from loving our neighbours, from prayer. This message pierced my world (speaking of clichés) with the force of conviction. In fact, it led me to consider how I might implement the slightly unconventional discipline of ruthlessly eliminating hurry for Lent.

I do not consider myself a Type A and I hadn’t thought hurry was a major issue for me, but after reading the book I cheerfully said, “That’s me shown up.” For instance, I see how multitasking has become an entrenched habit for me even though few activities lend themselves to multitasking. When did I start eating breakfast while standing over my laptop planning lessons?

I see too how I have failed to linger, especially over the evanescent. That is a word I encountered while reading Abraham Joshua Heschel and it means “temporal in a hauntingly beautiful way.” If I get caught in the madness of hurry, my daughters will grow up before I have learned to enjoy them and evanescence will elude me; I will live through my 37th year without absorbing its lessons; the gorse in February will come and go before I notice it.

It strikes me that we cannot eliminate hurry in a hurry. You root out Japanese knotweed only with persistent attention. And so I am embracing three disciplines to eliminate hurry, starting now and going all the way to Good Friday–and hopefully beyond.

1. Engage my 5 senses. Bringing my wife her morning tea, I let my hands envelop the mug and I take an extra moment to inhale the tea’s scent. When my 5-year-old daughter asks me yet another question, I pause, almost imperceptibly, to memorize her beautiful dark brown eyes. This is the spirit of Lent.
2. Give at least one compliment per day. Arriving in adultland, it surprised me that people seldom affirm you. It is just expected that you pay the bills, all the bills, on time every time; it is just expected that we do 534 little tasks in the space of 14 hours. But maybe, my fellow adults, we could do this while slowing down and affirming each other.
3. Adopt the mantra, ‘do whatever you have time for’. This beautiful little phrase broke into my prayers/heightened consciousness during my drive to work the other morning. Despite our attempts to transcend human limitations in this new Digital Age, we humans are still that: human. I draw inspiration from what I can accomplish and become, but recently I also feel acceptance and even a sense of joyful freedom at what I will not be. I will never be a musher for the Iditarod, a Buddhist monk or a teenage pop music sensation. Today I sit with that thought and soak it in like autumn sunlight.

What else, asked the eager young protégé after Dallas Willard answered his question about barriers to spiritual maturity. And Willard answered, that is all. Not the 7 deadly sins, not anger or pride or lust or even love of money. Not Progressivism and not Fundamentalism (although I do wonder about that one) and not the mark of the beast. Only hurry.

Something tells me it would be foolish to try to prove him wrong. And so, at least for the next 40 days, I shall live as if he is right, even if I do occasionally stand to eat my breakfast.