Take a Deep Breath

Several years ago, I heard a sermon. The speaker made many good points, but the one that has stuck with me is the distinction he made between those things which are important, and those things which are urgent. The important things, he said, are always being derailed by the urgent.
Mulling this over, I of course realized he was right. In our “hierarchy of needs,” health comes first, social support--friends, pets and family--usually comes next. These are things that cannot be replaced. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Wal-Mart doesn’t carry them.
But more often than not, we are “too busy” to really give these things the attention they deserve.
I can think of lots of examples: we don’t have time to exercise, or to sit down to home cooked meals, or to take walks on the beach, or read to our kids, or sit down for a cup of joe with Aunt Greta and Uncle Ben (Good gawd! That would take all day by the time they got out the good china, bickering with each other all the while, and then he’d start telling his stories and before you knew it, you’d have to stay for supper, and watch the evening news--and the car wouldn’t get washed, or the football game watched, or the leaves raked.). These are things that become more important when you can’t do them anymore--when the kids are grown, when the aunts and uncles are dead (and you can’t remember exactly how that story went even though you heard it a million times), when you can’t stand up straight, or drive anymore.
Much of the urgent we pay obeisance to is done to keep up with the Joneses, to look “normal.” We let daycare and television raise our kids so we can work to have the two-car garage, the picket fence and caller-ID. We struggle to feed our families, but we have cable TV.
We drag ourselves to work when we’re “fighting a flu,” or are “under the weather.” “But this project has to get finished,” we argue. Never mind that we, by expending our energies on work, are robbing our own body of the energy it needs to rid itself of whatever “bug” ails us. Never mind that we are probably prolonging our illness. Never mind that we are exposing our (important!) friends and family to our germs. And never mind that we probably are not functioning well enough to do our “project” the justice it requires.
But if we call in sick, we say, we will let down our boss, we will disappoint our clients, we will overburden our coworkers. These sentiments are admirable, but they are putting people over health--and if the people become sick as a result, well we have, in my opinion, negated the good we set out to do.
Just out of college, I was contract teaching at a local college and just wasn’t making ends meet. People were telling me I needed to get a “real” job (and what is teaching?!), and I was increasingly frustrated. Over the Christmas break (out of contract, with NO money coming in), I was contemplating throwing in the towel, and looking for work I knew would be less intrinsically satisfying, but more financially rewarding, when my landlady died. She had had gallbladder surgery five weeks earlier, and they had opened her up to find her riddled with cancer. The whole thing kind of knocked the wind out of my sails. The conclusion I came to was: If that had been me, I’d have been glad I stayed in the classroom.
I refer to this scenario often when I am harried and confused and frustrated. I take a deep breath and say: If I were to die next week, next year, tomorrow, what would be most important today. I won't be a slave to the urgent.