Goethe, the German writer (and lawyer), is credited with the saying: “Do not hurry. Do not rest.” I have this quotation written on an orange Post-it that is attached to a cork board in my kitchen. While I cannot remember how I first came across this quotation (perhaps I read it in a book about stress, or even discovered it by accident while “researching” on the internet), I do know that these paradoxical imperatives describe a way to approach life and, while not scripture, are wise words.
I am a doer. Give me deadlines, tasks, goals – benchmarks of success – and I will meet them (although, I must admit, I was late in submitting this article to the editor).
When I was a college student, being a doer meant that I had to be “active.” Involvement was my middle name; actually, my middle name is Yoshiko – it does not mean involvement. There were so many things that I needed to accomplish, so many decisions that I needed to make, so many people that I needed to meet. This seemed to me to be the purpose of college. I was finally an adult and I would make every second count.
Think about it. For most college students, the entire span of their lives can be contained in terms of 18 to 24years. At the same time, college students are constantly reminded of all that they must do. Get good grades, find a job, pick a spouse – from my perspective, I needed to become part of the well-oiled, fast-moving machine of life. Since my conception of “forever” only encompassed about twenty years or so, I felt that I needed to move quickly from one task to the next. If I rested, things would not get accomplished.
I carried this same attitude into law school and even into the early years of my marriage. During this time, my father had the annoying habit of saying that “Life’s short, but there’s no rush.”
Like Goethe, he was prescribing a way of living. He saw my activity and hurry, but he also saw my lack of rest and the damage that it caused.
Both of these sayings speak to the transitory nature of life while highlighting the urgency that we often feel in light of the passage of time. Because I believed that life was short, (in part, because my own twenty-odd years seemed so short) I could not comprehend anything but hurry. I was frustrated by my father’s words and saw rest as the enemy of the urgency I felt. I see this same sense of urgency in many of you, my dear students, and in coming full-circle, offer these same words to you.
“Do not hurry. Do not rest.”
Neither extreme is satisfying. Hurry distracts us from the present. Rest can abide too readily in the now. Live not in the space where hurry or rest dominate your decisions or actions, but cultivate an intention in living.
I wish I could say that I have solved this dilemma in my own life, but the reality of cultivation is that it takes time. And that is something that cannot be hurried.
