Against the Act of Urgency…!

Credit By: HARDEEP BALI

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• 23 Apr 2026

At 8:20 on a weekday morning, the tea is already getting cold. It sits on the edge of the table, half-drunk and forgotten, not because it is unwanted but because something else has claimed attention after that. A text, perhaps. Or even the pressure of the day that has barely begun. The tea, like many other things, waits briefly and is finally abandoned.

It is in these small moments that the pace of life reveals itself through what gets left behind. Not very long ago, mornings carried a different pace and meaning. Tea was not just consumed but inhabited as it stretched across conversations and the unremarkable passing of time. There was no urgency in finishing it, no invisible clock measuring its relevance. It was just there.

A lot of things have changed along the way. In present times, a day is like a series of ‘tabs’ left open in the mind, nothing fully closed or attended to. As we begin reading an article, suddenly we remember an email that we haven’t sent and then switch to answering messages or something else half-heartedly. It is like time does not stay still. These incidents capture something difficult to articulate, i.e., not the lack of time but the fragmentation of it.

This fragmentation appears in the smallest intervals, like waiting at a traffic signal, standing in a queue or sitting alone for a few minutes and suddenly the screen lights up, and that one moment turns into a flow of content that consumes hours.

There was a time when such pauses had a different kind of presence. A memory surfaces here, not particularly significant but persistent, like a bus moving through a familiar route, it reminds of the same people moving through a familiar route, watching those shops pass by. There was nothing to do, nowhere else to be, yet the mind wandered freely, not purposefully. That kind of wandering had no outcome, but it felt complete.

So, what changed? It is not just the speed of life but our tolerance for stillness. We become easily uneasy in moments that demand anything from us. Stillness feels like a lapse in productivity, a gap to be filled, a kind of absence. And so we move to sort of eliminate that through habit. And the result is a life continuously occupied yet curiously unabsorbed.

This kind of unease extends beyond our individual moments into the structure of our days. Tasks overlap, conversations are conducted alongside other conversations, and attention becomes divided before it can fully settle. Even rest becomes measured, optimised and occasionally documented.

Yet there are moments when rhythm falters. For example, a power outage late at night. The lights go out, and the Wi-Fi goes down. At first, there is mild annoyance at the change in routine and the sudden inconvenience. But then something else happens. The room gets quieter. Without the usual distractions, your mind almost automatically changes focus.

Someone starts to speak. Not in the quick, functional way that most conversations go, but slowly, with breaks. The darkness makes a space that does not need to be filled right away. For a short time, time lets go.

These kinds of moments don't happen very often, which might be why they seem to have a bigger effect than they do. They show, even if only for a moment, that there is another way to be with time, not as a way to get away from reality, but as a way to be in it.

But when the lights come back on, the familiar pace comes back. Devices reconnect, notifications start up again, and the moment fades away, as if it never happened. The change is so smooth that it is hard to remember what you felt for a short time.

It would be easy to see this as a simple loss; the slower rhythms are going away because of how fast things are moving now. But the truth is more complicated. Slowness has not gone away completely; it is now sporadic and weak.

It shows up in the pause before responding to a message. It is also in the choice to linger a bit after completing a task. You see it in those moments when you do something without the urge to share or post about it. These are not acts of defiance. They are more subtle than that. Almost like they happen by chance. Maybe that is what makes those moments important.

If urgency sets the pace, these small pauses remind us that it does not have total control. They carve out spaces where time is not just measured by productivity or duty. We are probably not going back to slower days; life is wrapped too tightly around these fast-paced systems. But within all that, there’s still room to treat time differently. Not as something to squeeze the most out of, but as something that can just exist. Maybe we can learn that. Maybe the cold tea will finally get noticed again.

Things are not what they were. When we realise we have raced past something simple, it stings a little, not because of what we missed, but because of how fast we went. Just noticing that pace, that is where the change starts. To soften our pace, to reclaim our attention, and to live not just faster or slower, but more deliberately.

As Henry David Thoreau said, “It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?”

(The Author is a poet, columnist and doctoral researcher. Feedback: writerbali007@gmail.com)