Member-only story
Nature Doesn’t Rush, So Why Are You?
Overworked? Overwhelmed? Maybe You’re Moving Too Fast.
Not a member? Read the story here.
I read somewhere that an oak tree takes a hundred years to grow, fifty years to live, and another hundred years to die. Ninety-one thousand, two hundred and fifty days. Just under a hundred thousand sunrises, give or take.
How many of us can imagine this kind of patience?
We rush. I rush. Late for appointments I made, late for opportunities I created, late for life itself. Always behind, never caught up. The tyranny of the clock face, the calendar square, the deadline.
The clock is a recent invention, in the grand scheme. The calendar older, but still a human construct imposed on the ceaseless turning of our little rock around its star. Nature knows nothing of these things. Nature doesn’t rush.
The glacier carves the valley over millennia. The river finds its path to the sea through trial and error, meandering this way and that over centuries. The moth emerges from its cocoon when it’s ready, not when the world demands it.
Yet here we are, checking our watches.
