ASAP

Have you ever noticed we are living in a time that everything is for yesterday? If you send a message, you want a quick reply, if you call the doctor, you want an appointment for the same day, if you decide to have a baby, you want it now, if you decide to do something, everything should happen as soon as possible. A couple years ago, we still had to wait some days for an email answer, a postcard to arrive, a phone call. Or, if we go back to our great grandparents age, they were used to waiting some months for one reply. I remember my father told me that my great grandfather went to Europe, and then he sent a letter to my great grandmother proposing to her. He needed to wait a month for the letter to arrive, and another month for the reply letter. For us, stories like these could make us desperate. We unlearn waiting. The same for the children. If they need to wait for something, they get bored. We turn on cartoons, We give them the Ipad, anything to avoid frustration.

But have you ever asked yourself the risks of living a life like that? When everything we do is urgent, We normalize feeling anxiety, to feel our hearts beat faster and we have turned into a generation that needs to take pills to sleep, pills to calm down, or even, to take pills to deal with our problems.

It’s difficult, but we need to understand that sometimes getting bored is normal. To wait for a reply for a couple hours is not the end of the world and, most important, that our urgency maybe is not the urgency of others, and we need to deal with that the best way we can. Maybe some breathing could help, or allowing ourselves to feel mad, frustrated and sad. It’s normal and healthy to feel like this throughout the day. Next time you feel lost, with so many urgent things to do, take a deep breath and think “if everything is urgent, nothing is really urgent”.