But we will not become unhurried on our own. We cannot achieve this alone. We will have to enter a life of training. So let’s look at practices for the hurry-sick.

“Slowing”

The first practice is one we might call “slowing.” This involves cultivating patience by deliberately choosing to place ourselves in positions where we simply have to wait. (This practice has a definite “gamelike” quality, although we may not like it much, at least at first.)

Over the next month deliberately drive in the slow lane on the expressway. It may be that not swerving from lane to lane will cause you to arrive five minutes or so later than you usually would. But you will find that you don’t get nearly so angry at other drivers. Instead of trying to pass them, say a little prayer as they go by, asking God to bless them.

Declare a fast from honking. Put your horn under a vow of silence.

For a week, eat your food slowly. Force yourself to chew at least fifteen times before each swallow.

For the next month, when you are at the grocery store, look carefully to see which check-out line is the longest. Get in it. Let one person go ahead of you.

Go through one day without wearing a watch.

The list could go on, but you get the idea. We must find ways to deliberately choose waiting, ways that make hurry impossible. As we practice them, we should tell God we are trusting him to enable us to accomplish all we need to get done.

Often people worry that if they don’t rush, they will accomplish less. In fact, researchers have found that there is simply no correlation between hurry or Type-A behavior and productivity.

We will discover we can survive without hurry. If we practice these ways diligently enough, we will become unhurried people.

The Need for Solitude

A more traditional practice is solitude. Jesus engaged in it frequently. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus went to the wilderness for an extended period of fasting and prayer. He also went into solitude when he heard of the death of John the Baptist, when he was going to choose his disciples, after he had been involved in healing a leper, and after his followers had engaged in ministry. This pattern continued into the final days of his life, when again he withdrew into the solitude of the garden of Gethsemane to pray. He ended his ministry, as he began it, with the practice of solitude.

Jesus taught his followers to do the same. And as he said to them, “Come away to a deserted place,” he says to us still. Wise followers of Christ’s way have always understood the necessity and benefit of solitude. It is, to quote an old phrase, the “furnace of transformation.”

What makes solitude so important? Solitude is the one place where we can gain freedom from the forces of society that will otherwise relentlessly mold us.

According to a much-traveled analogy, if we put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately hop out. But put the frog in water that’s at room temperature and heat it slowly, and the creature will stay there until it boils to death. Put him in a lethal environment suddenly, and he will escape. But introduce the danger gradually, and he will never notice.

The truth is that the dangers to which we are most vulnerable are generally not the sudden, dramatic, obvious ones. They are the ones that creep up on us, that are so much a part of our environment that we don’t even notice them.

The deeper truth is that we live in a lethal environment. American society is filled with ideas and values and pressures and temptations about success and security and comfort and happiness that we will not even notice unless we withdraw on occasion. Thomas Merton wrote that the early church fathers placed such a premium on solitude because they considered society to be a shipwreck from which any sane person must swim for his life. These people believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster. The apostle Paul put it this way: “Don’t let the world around squeeze you into its own mold.”

One writer notes an experiment done with mice a few years ago. A researcher found that it takes a high dose of amphetamines to kill a mouse living in solitude. But a group of mice will start hopping around and hyping each other up so much that a dosage twenty times smaller will be lethal—so great is the effect of “the world” on mice. In fact, a mouse that had been given no amphetamines at all, placed in a group on the drug, will get so hopped up that in ten minutes or so it will be dead. “In groups they go off like popcorn or firecrackers,” the writer observed.

We might guess that only a mouse would be so foolish as to hang out with a bunch of other mice that were so hopped up, going at such a frantic pace in such mindless activity for no discernible purpose, that they would put their own well-being and even lives at risk. It would be wrong to think so. The messages come at us in a continual stream:

“We’ll help you move faster…. Act now, don’t delay!…You can buy it now if you’ll just stretch—no money down, easy monthly payments…. You can earn it if you run a little faster, stay a little longer, work a little harder…. It’s okay to get old as long as you don’t get wrinkled or gray or liver spots or bald—as long as you don’t look old…. It’s okay to be frantic and stressed and empty and exhausted—that’s the way everybody is…. We’ll help you move faster.”

“The press of busyness is like a charm,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Its power swells…. it reaches out seeking always to lay hold of ever-younger victims so that childhood or youth are scarcely allowed the quiet and the retirement in which the Eternal may unfold a divine growth.” The truth is, as much as we complain about it, we are drawn to hurry. It makes us feel important. It keeps the adrenaline pumping. It means we don’t have to look too closely at the heart or life. It keeps us from feeling our loneliness.

Solitude is the remedy for the busyness that charms. But what exactly is solitude? What do we do when we practice solitude? What should we bring along to that quiet place?

The primary answer, of course, is “nothing.” A man recently told me about preparing for his first extended period of solitude. He took books, message tapes, CDs, and a VCR—some of the very things we would think of trying to get away from.

At its heart, solitude is primarily about not doing something. Just as fasting means to refrain from eating, so solitude means to refrain from society. When we go into solitude, we withdraw from conversation, from the presence of others, from noise, from the constant barrage of stimulation.

At its heart, solitude is primarily about not doing something.

“In solitude,” Henri Nouwen wrote, “I get rid of my scaffolding.” Scaffolding is all the stuff we use to keep ourselves propped up, to convince ourselves that we are important or okay. In solitude we have no friends to talk with, no phone calls or meetings, no television sets, no music or books or newspapers to occupy and distract the mind. Each of us would be, in the words of the old hymn, “just as I am.” Neither accomplishments nor résumés nor possessions nor networks would define me—just me and my sinfulness, my desire or lack of desire for God.

John Ortberg, The Life You’ve Always Wanted: Spiritual Disciplines for Ordinary People (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).

We have just released a new Bible Study on the topic: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.

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