On learning to sit with questions rather than rushing for answers.
News of the world environment
NEWSLETTER | APRIL 12, 2024
On Taking Time
The times are urgent, let us slow down. I heard this old African saying for the first time two weeks ago, sitting in a packed concert hall at the Bioneers conference in Berkeley, California, and something tight within my chest unfurled. As a journalist who started her career in the intense deadline-driven world of daily newspapers, and one who has been covering the rapid decline of our living world for nearly two decades, the feeling of urgency and the need to act has become part of my DNA.
I’ve long known it’s not healthy — not for me nor for the work I do — and I’ve been trying to unlearn the need to hurry. But progress has been… um, slow. It’s hard to let go of the urge to respond quickly in the face of the many unfolding crises of our time. But when I heard the phrase that morning, it struck a deep chord. I felt like, finally, I could for real give myself permission to ease up, to take the time to be more thoughtful, more intentional, in the way I engage with this world.
Later, I looked up philosopher and poet Bayo Akomolafe, who has lifted up this saying in recent years as “something that needed to be shared at this time when the theme of urgency, the subject of the eleventh hour, and the prospects of an apocalypse scenario (World War III? Climate change disaster? Hadron collider mishap? Trump?) are now familiar tropes in our conversations about the future.”
“In ‘hurrying up’ all the time, we often lose sight of the abundance of resources that might help us meet today’s most challenging crises,” he writes. “However, the call to slow down works to bring us face to face with the invisible, the hidden, the unremarked, the yet-to-be-resolved. Sometimes, what is the appropriate thing to do is not the effective thing to do.”
As our world churns on, as we are bombarded daily with urgent calls to make statements, take stands, choose sides, I’ve been reflecting on Akomolafe’s words: “What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?”
Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor-in-Chief, Earth Island Journal
PS: Neil Young has invited Earth Island Journal to join him on his upcoming Love Earth tour along with Crazy Horse, as one of a select group of magazines featured at a “News You Can Trust” tent during all of the tour’s concerts. We are chuffed!
Photo by Daiga Ellaby
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