Urgency Is Contagious
A quiet reflection on urgency, what settles into the body and between people, and the small pause that makes room for love to lead instead of pressure.
DISCERNMENT IN THE WILD
Post 2
3 min read
I’m noticing how heavy the room weather has been lately—especially here in Minnesota. The air feels tight with urgency, like everything is asking for a response right now.
I’m not trying to solve the world from my body. I’m trying to notice what the world does to my body, so I can move through it without becoming it. This is what discernment looks like when urgency is in the room—or what I’ve come to think of as discernment in the wild.
The morning this became clear, I had just woken up. My mom had already been up for a while, and we were sitting together in the living room. The light was soft, but the atmosphere wasn’t. We’d argued the day before—not dramatically, just enough that something unfinished was still hanging between us. The kind of tension that doesn’t shout, but hums quietly in the background.
We started talking about how urgent everything feels lately—how easy it is to react before we’ve really felt anything through. The heaviness was already in my upper back and shoulders, but as the conversation continued, I could feel it spread. It reminded me of a wind-up toy, cranked so tight it can’t turn anymore.
That was the signal.
Not a thought. Not a position. Just my body saying: this is too much to keep spinning.
My reflex in moments like this is to explain. Quickly. Clearly. As if the right words might dissolve the tension and restore some kind of order. The cost of that reflex is familiar—exhaustion, regret, loss of clarity, sometimes even damage to the relationship itself.
But underneath that reflex is something more honest.
I want to feel met. I want understanding before resolution. I want the pressure in the room to soften enough for something true to be heard.
What I could feel between us was borrowed weather—urgency that didn’t belong to either of us alone, but had settled in the room anyway. There was magnetism there too, a real desire to connect, to feel okay again. But magnetism gets quieter when urgency takes the mic. And repulsion isn’t wrong. It’s information. But when it becomes the only language available, everything starts to sound like a fight.
Later that day, a line from Prince kept repeating in my mind:
We should champion our similarities, not our differences.
When I hear that line, my body responds before my mind does. My shoulders loosen a fraction. My chest makes a little more room. It doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t erase the tension or make disagreement disappear. It just changes the tone.
And sometimes that’s the difference.
Not resolution. Not certainty. Just enough space for love to lead instead of urgency.
I’m still learning how much urgency shapes the field before anyone says a word. How quickly it turns people into positions. How easily it pulls us away from what we actually want—which, so often, is not to win, but to feel contact again. To feel human inside the tension instead of consumed by it.
Maybe that’s part of discernment too: noticing what helps the body loosen its grip on urgency. Not so truth can be avoided, but so it doesn’t have to arrive through force.
This is how I’m learning to live with urgency without letting it run me. Not by finding the right response faster. Not by arguing my way back to connection. But by pausing long enough to feel what’s actually happening inside me before I speak, explain, or take a side.
Urgency is contagious. So is calm. So is presence. And sometimes discernment in the wild looks like nothing more than staying with the heaviness in your shoulders, taking one breath, and letting love—not urgency—set the tone.
Take your time. Your nervous system is not an emergency broadcast system.
You might keep reading here:
On what it can feel like when the system is no longer organized around the same urgency, and the old coherence begins to change → Outgrowing Weather