Urgency

It’s 1 PM and I’m still in bed.

I woke up 4 hours ago but I’m still here lying in my underwear, watching YouTube videos and lurking around on /r/nba before the finals tomorrow.

I haven’t done this in a while.

Does it feel good? I think the expected answer should be a big fat yes, but when your mind has been running in a rhythm of urgency, it almost feels a bit anxious that you’re not actually doing anything.

Yes, yes. I get it. Relaxation is part of life. Doing nothing is a part of doing something. Every summit has two parts — the climb up, and the climb down.

But I didn’t choose this climb down.

My ankle is messed up, my rotator cuff torn, and wrist shot. I’m pretty much limited to a 500m walking radius from my apartment, and I can’t even complain because I physically can’t complain — my voice has been gone for 2 months!

Even my knuckle is sprained — and I don’t even know why!

But actually I do.

I do know why.

Ever since I went fire mode last summer, I’ve been pushing myself to constantly sprint forward. I realized how much time I’d wasted in the last few years and how hard I needed to work to compensate.

Everyone laughs and says, “Oh come on, you’re 20! You have so much time left! There’s nothing to worry about.”

But to me, time was decreasingly finite. Each second that passed was another resource gone — and it could either be wasted, or it could be used. I believed that not only was each second valuable, it was also weighted, meaning 1 second holds different value when you’re 5 years old than it does when you’re 10.

Accordingly, the time I have when I’m 20 holds different value than that of when I’m 30. If I eat a Big Mac today, it would impact me differently than if I eat a Big Mac tomorrow.

And I can’t emphasize here that different is not a < or > comparison. You can’t really hold a number to how important your time is because it just wouldn’t make sense. Sure, you can say, “Oh my time is worth $50 an hour!”, but how important your time to you is meant to be subjective — it’s always changing along with yourself. Normalizing it to some kind of standard makes that value meaningless.

The point is, when I say different, I mean that there are certain things that you can only do in certain times of your life.

Each stage of life changes its requirements. Even your body and brain’s physiology will impact the things you’re able and want to do as they change.

When you’re 12 months old, you can wet the bed, crawl around naked, and shit your pants in public.

When you’re 12 years old, you can wear your pants to your ankles, say shit like “gnarly”, and have your parents spank you for getting into trouble.

But as you age — along with the number, things change. Sure you can still do things, but it isn’t really the same. Crawling around naked and shitting your pants in public just doesn’t really feel the same when you’re 40, you know?

And when you’re 20 years old, you can go to university, experience college life, and chase after your dreams with no real responsibilities or commitments.

You can work out and recover the next day. You can train for marathons and bust your ass grinding to hit the bars that you set to achieve. You can dream of K2, Mt Everest, and all the greatest peaks in the world. You can even still eat Korean fried chicken and have solid poop!

But as this stage of your life passes, the likelihood of accomplishing many of these things drop, and the experience and meaning behind it changes as well.

It’s similar to the concept of satiating cravings. Those yam fries might taste great because you want them today, but tomorrow, they won’t taste the same. Certain things only hold certain emotion, experience, and meaning, if you do them in certain times.

And realizing this, I was always under the mentality of having to do everything and everything now. If I wanted to do something, I would try everything in and out of my own power to get it done, when I want it done.

You might be reading it and thinking, oh, that sounds really driven! I respect the get-shit-done hustle!

But it didn’t really work like that, for me at least.

My ankle, my rotator cuff, my body, and my voice aren’t injuries that were solely caused by a single event. They result from the constant, chronic stress grinding on me from trying to push over my thresholds, all the time.

Signs would tell me to wait for tomorrow, but I would unrelentingly persist to go today; and the constant overuse of my voice, my body, and my mind did not give me achievement, accomplishment, or success. It resulted in injury, setback, and anxiety.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes it’s good to push — sometimes you need to be a little ferocious to accomplish things in life, but the difference is: push when life is tell you yes but you are saying no; reevaluate if you are saying yes but life is telling you no.

I was excessive, and I paid for it.

These sound like stories of not knowing my limits, but the fundamental core of the problem lies in this constant worry of urgency. The worry that my time is finite and one day I won’t be able to enjoy things as I can now.

I have an unconscious stream that continuously reminds me the time I have in my current stage of life will be over soon. I tell myself that one day, my joints are going to rust, my mind is going to sleep, and my motivation is going to dry. That even if the world is telling me to wait, I rebel back yelling I don’t have time!

And I think these worries are perfectly reasonable for a 20 year old who has dreams of genuinely doing something for the world and other people. In fact, you learn to appreciate each part of your journey and not take something as important as time for granted, but sometimes the things you think you need right now may not be as necessary or urgent as they seem. Slowing down is a part of moving fast.

One of the biggest problems of the young and motivated is that it’s hard to see the value of patience. That not everything is supposed to be pushed and sometimes life has its own way of guiding you. And if you constantly run against the gradient of its natural flow, you’ll eventually find yourself washed downstream.

Life has its way of giving you signals and hints. It’s up to you to listen to them.

Even though I’m still lying here without having eaten breakfast or even drunk a single drop of water, wallowing in a body that may take the next few weeks, months, or even years to fully recover, I am learning to accept that. I’m learning to accept, that because of my own mistakes, my own impatience, my own unnecessary urgency, there will be things that I simply can’t do.

And believe me, It’s frustrating. Really. Sometimes there’s an incredibly burning, unavoidable anxiety that I might lose some of the things that simply make me, me. My voice, my ankle, my shoulder — being able to talk to my friends or tell the people I love that I love them, being able to walk to the grocery store, being able to flip the morning omelette — they give me the ability to do many of the things I want to in life. The thought of losing those things is tough.

But I’ll give them time. I’ll give myself time. Nothing is more urgent than our fundamental well-being, health, and state of mind. It’s something I’ve learned and imprinted during this stage of my journey, and I know that this period of my life may be one that offers the greatest opportunity of learning.

I’ve fell down the mountain again. But this time, I’m not in a hurry to climb back up. I’ll pace faster when I feel I’m ready, but I’ll be listening to the heartbeat of nature before I decide where to go. Let me take my time to hear the scenery, see the music, and fully enjoy my exploration.

Whoever has been talking to me these past few years. I get it.

Time isn’t meant to be objectified.

I can recognize the importance of each second in different times of life, but time is not a race, nor is it a challenge you have to “beat”. It is something that’s not meant to be always optimized or intellectualized, and something that will pass you by no matter what you do.

So be mindful of each unit of life that you experience. Continue to be driven, fight for your vision, and strive to create the dreams that you dream of.

But along the way, let life guide you a little.

And don’t forget to exercise.