Regretting the Hurry

"Someone asked me recently what was my biggest regret in life. I thought a moment, surveying the vast and cluttered landscape of my blunders and losses, the evil I have done and the evil that's been done againstme.
'Being in a hurry,' I said.
'Pardon?'
'Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all that rushing.'
Through all that haste, I thought I was marking up time. It turns out I was throwing it away."
(Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God, page 45)


Go back to the beginning and read the quoted passage above again. Slow down while you read it. Take time to reflect on what Mark Buchanan is saying here.


How would you answer the question about what your biggest regret was in life? What do you see as your biggest regret?

It usually doesn't take us long to come up with things we regret. Choices we made. People we chose to keep in our lives and people we chose to remove from our lives. Jobs we chose to take or not to take. Things we chose to do with our money or possessions and things we chose not to do with them.

When I really stop to think about it, despite all the choices I've made that are regrets, I have to say that I've come to agree with Buchanan on this one. My biggest regret is being in a hurry and it's the root of most of the decisions I regret making.

When we're living life in a hurry, our decisions suffer. We're so concerned about getting to the next thing that we run from one thing to the next with no time to think.

Are you living life in a hurry?

Do you see living life in a hurry as a regret? Why or why not?

I wonder what would happen if we became intentional about not living life in a hurry. What would happen if we slowed down enough to be really present in the moment and gave ourselves the room in our schedules to think?

I think that rather than feeling like we couldn't possibly get everything done, we would find that we have the time to do what we need to do without a problem.