Wednesday, January 17, 2024
10:49PM · New York City, NY
I was heading to the office today and got to the station whereupon I found that my train was coming in 1 minute according to the display outside (see image below) 🙀 In a hurry, I sprinted down the stairs to get to the train in time, tapped in, then realized there was no train pulling in to the station. It was another 3 minutes, actually. I could’ve walked at a regular pace and I still would’ve made the train. I also wasn’t in much of a rush to be at the office either. At the risk of sounding like an attack on the MTA or a corny LinkedIn post, there might be an allegory here.
It feels like there’s a lot of displays in life telling us “1m”. It’s easy to look at peers farther along in their career and think “ah shoot I gotta catch up”. Or maybe wanting to be at a different place faith-wise and being frustrated that there’s been little change on that front. It would be wrong to swing to the other extreme and say “just chill no need to do anything, you’ll be good”. You still have to walk to the platform. But maybe there’s some wisdom in walking, not running. Even if you miss the train, there will be another.
There’s this quote from Tozer’s “Pursuit of God” that comes to mind here:
“The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.”
I’m comforted by this concept of cultivation, like how one would cultivate a garden. It turns out gardening takes time, patience, effort - this is evident by the recent pre-mature death of my indoor ficus. It’s also not fully dependent on me. But I can’t push a button to sprout leaves immediately. And neither would I want to, all things considered. It’s surely much more rewarding the way it is, to look back on a slowly cultivated, deep, rich life.
This is all to say that I’m not very good at this. Even after making the realization and writing this, I anticipate I still won’t be very good at this. But at the very least, it’s a tangible reminder. A reminder to stop rushing, to stop hurrying, to stop fixating on the future, to enjoy right now as much as I can. The train will come. It always does.
“I don’t believe that good work is ever done in a hurry.”
CS Lewis
Example of aforementioned display shown above (not the actual one, this photo is courtesy of Karsten Moran for the New York Times)