The Difference Between Busy and Hurry
He was always in a hurry to get where he was not.
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
There was one day, years ago now, when I realized I was always telling the kids to hurry: “hurry up and get your shoes on!” “hurry up and finish eating!” And something in me didn’t like that. It’s not that our kids are particularly slow; in fact, they move faster than most, probably because my husband and I are ruthlessly efficient. What rubbed me wrong about those words was their tone of exasperation and impatience. Come on, you’re keeping me waiting. They’re kids. Kids don’t move in adult ways or at adult paces. If they needed moving along, there were better ways to do it: lending a hand, budgeting more time. I decided I didn’t want to say “hurry up” again—and for the most part, I haven’t.
Living without hurry, though, can be harder than just not saying the words. We live in a culture of hurry, which assumes that doing something more quickly is always better than doing it more slowly. At the root of that is a veneration of productivity: the more quickly you can do something, the more you can get done, and the more you get done, presumably the more productive you are. We become busy people who hurry about.
But it’s interesting to consider the difference between busy and hurry. Being busy is being occupied, having many things to do. Being hurried is doing those things quickly, in a rushed manner, at a rapid pace. One can be busy slowly or busy quickly; being busy is simply an external condition. Hurry is an internal state, a mindset that results in a certain pace of living. When we’re hurried, we tend to cast our eyes to the future, to miss present opportunities, to be more concerned about the schedule than the actual substance of the event.
Jesus was busy, but he wasn’t hurried. During his years in ministry, he did a lot in a typical day, but he gave others his undivided attention. He acted in a deliberate and attentive manner. He paid attention to interruptions and was not reluctant to linger.
Dallas Willard writes:
Hurry is the great enemy of souls in our day. Being busy is mostly a condition of our outer world; it is having many things to do. Being hurried is a problem of the soul. It’s being so preoccupied with myself and what myself has to do that I am no longer able to be fully present with God and fully present with you. There is no way a soul can thrive when it is hurried.
Perhaps hurry is best measured in light of presence. When we are unable to be present to God, and present to others, we are too hurried. We have become too preoccupied with ourselves and our tasks to live well. And perhaps part of it is seeing that productivity is not the same thing as efficiency—productivity simply means reaching one’s goal, and if the goal is growth, if the goal is relationship, sometimes it’s more productive to go about it slowly. To be busy, slowly.
We know when we are in the presence of someone who is hurried. I think of how it is as a physician: when a patient thinks I am hurried, I know something is wrong. But I’ve seen doctors who are busy, slowly. They may have a packed schedule, but their patients never feel rushed, because they are being given the right kind of attention. Those doctors seem to me to have a certain gravity of attention: they are grounded in the present. If I am busy, that’s how I want to be: busy, slowly. Able to move through the things I do, without losing the attention to the present that I need.
