When Urgency Isn’t

Move

I have a pattern of responding to urgency before clarity.

Yesterday was mentally heavy—back-to-back meetings, constant talking, cognitive overload with almost no physical movement. By 9 PM, I was depleted.

That’s when my boss pinged from Canada: “When can we talk?”

The impulse was immediate—to reply, assess urgency, manage expectations. Not because the matter was critical, but because authority amplifies urgency.

I didn’t respond.

The decision wasn’t spiritual. It was operational: delay response until cognitive freshness returned.

I lay in bed after dinner, read a few pages of Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, then put the book aside and closed my eyes. The work ping tried to pull me back into motion. The pause held.

See

Silence settled in. Breath slowed. The body decompressed before the mind did. Sleep came easily.

At 6 AM, I replied: “Just woke up. We can do evening India time.” Two hours later, he replied: “Now?”

I called immediately. We spoke for 30 minutes. He was anxious. Business was slow. He was in Canada for family reasons, not by choice, and dependent on me for updates. He had made commitments to his co-founders and needed clarity.

Had the call happened the night before, I would have mirrored his anxiety—offered vague reassurance, premature commitments, or timelines shaped more by exhaustion than reality.

Instead, with a fresh mind, I gave clear status on three key items, named what was still pending with realistic timelines, and didn’t absorb his anxiety. By the end of the call, his tone had shifted—not because everything was solved, but because clarity is stabilizing even when the news isn’t ideal.

Reflect

Urgency is rarely external; it is internally manufactured.
Authority intensifies urgency, not importance.

When an anxious founder meets an exhausted operator, speed transfers anxiety. Clarity contains it.

Delay, when intentional, is not avoidance—it is strategy.

Clarity has a time component. Ignoring that exacts a compounding cost.

A simple rule emerges. It is when the body is exhausted, no response improves outcomes.

The practice is not to eliminate the mind, but to pause before obeying it.