Great Urgency Quotes

I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair.

Yet human intelligence has another force, too: the sense of urgency that gives human smarts their drive. Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our mortality; to a great degree, it is our mortality.

When you become vulnerable, any ideal or perfect image of yourself falls away. (...) Many people are addicted to perfection, and in their pursuit of the ideal, they have no patience with vulnerability. (...) Every poet would like to write the ideal poem. Though they never achieve this, sometimes it glimmers through their best work. Ironically, the very beyondness of the idea is often the touch of presence that renders the work luminous. The beauty of the ideal awakens a passion and urgency that brings out the best in the person and calls forth the dream of excellence. The beauty of the true ideal is its hospitality towards woundedness, weakness, failure and fall-back. Yet so many people are infected with the virus of perfection. They cannot rest; they allow themselves no ease until they come close to the cleansed domain of perfection. This false notion of perfection does damage and puts their lives under great strain. It is a wonderful day in a life when one is finally able to stand before the long, deep mirror of one's own reflection and view oneself with appreciation, acceptance, and forgiveness. On that day one breaks through the falsity of images and expectations which have blinded one's spirit. One can only learn to see who one is when one learns to view oneself with the most intimate and forgiving compassion.

He reaches over, takes my face in his hands and pulls me to him. In my idle moments, imagining such a scene, I have always assumed that it would be the other way round, that I would reach for him and he would pull away, denouncing me as a degenerate and a false friend. But now I am neither shocked nor surprised by his initiative, nor do I feel any of the great urgency that I thought I would, should this moment ever come to pass. Instead, it feels perfectly natural, everything he does to me, everything that he allows to happen between us. And for the first time since that dreadful afternoon when my father beat me to within an inch of my life, I feel that I have come home.

Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one's human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death - in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths.

Get it Right today, for today wil never come again

For a considerable portion of humanity today, it is possible and indeed likely that one's neighbor, one's colleague, or one's employer will have a different mother tongue, eat different food, and follow a different religion than oneself. It is a matter of great urgency, therefore, that we find ways to cooperate with one another in a spirit of mutual acceptance and respect. In such a world, I feel, it is vital for us to find genuinely sustainable and universal approach to ethics, inner values, and personal integrity-an approach that can transcend religious, cultural, and racial differences and appeal to people at a sustainable, universal approach is what I call the project of secular ethics. All religions, therefore, to some extent, ground the cultivation of inner values and ethical awareness in some kind of metaphysical (that is, not empirically demonstrable) understanding of the world and of life after death. And just as the doctrine of divine judgment underlies ethical teachings in many theistic religions, so too does the doctrine of karma and future lives in non-theistic religions. As I see it, spirituality has two dimensions. The first dimension, that of basic spiritual well-being-by which I mean inner mental and emotional strength and balance-does not depend on religion but comes from our innate human nature as beings with a natural disposition toward compassion, kindness, and caring for others. The second dimension is what may be considered religion-based spirituality, which is acquired from our upbringing and culture and is tied to particular beliefs and practices. The difference between the two is something like the difference between water and tea. On this understanding, ethics consists less of rules to be obeyed than of principles for inner self-regulation to promote those aspects of our nature which we recognize as conducive to our own well-being and that of others. It is by moving beyond narrow self-interest that we find meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in life.

Do you miss a parent you never knew?” he whispered. Kate considered his question for some time. His voice had held a hoarse urgency that told her there was something critical about her reply. Why, she couldn’t imagine, but something about her childhood clearly rang a chord within his heart. “Yes,” she finally answered, “but not in the way you would think. You can’t really miss her, because you didn’t know her, but there’s still a hole in your life—a big empty spot, and you know who was supposed to fit there, but you can’t remember her, and you don’t know what she was like, and so you don’t know how she would have filled that hole.” Her lips curved into a sad sort of smile. “Does this make any sense?” Anthony nodded. “It makes a great deal of sense

My father, who lived to ninety-four, often said that the eighties had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’ too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At eighty, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was forty or sixty. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together. I am looking forward to being eighty.

Caron for a few minutes agreed to be in his communications room at the time Caron suggested to take a person-to-person call from Lebel on a matter of great urgency. Van Ruys of South Africa was out

I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called “A Voyage round the world.” 

There is great urgency—there are sheep without a shepherd, unprotected from death—let’s pray. There is great opportunity—there is a harvest waiting to be brought in, if only there are harvesters to do it—let’s pray.

We must never lose our sense of urgency in making improvements. We must never settle for “good enough,” because good is the enemy of great,

the great mass of humanity distracted by the trappings and fabricated urgency of modern life.

Yes, they have. It was back when they still didn't know each other by name. In the great hall of a mountain lodge, with people drinking and chattering around them, they exchanged a few commonplaces, but the tone of their voices made it clear that they wanted each other, and they withdrew into an empty corridor where, wordlessly, they kissed. She opened her mouth and pressed her tongue into Jean Marc's mouth, eager to lick whatever she would find inside. This zeal of their tongues was not a sensual necessity but an urgency to let each other know that they were prepared to make love, right away, instantly, fully and wildly and without losing a moment.

Most of us think our lives are too full already. But when, in faith, you start to pray for more ministry, amazing things occur. As your opportunities expand, your ability and resources supernaturally increase, too. Right away you’ll sense the pleasure God feels in your request and His urgency to accomplish great things through you.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

This morning, my son asked me for money to buy a sheep. Should I help him, do you think?” “Since it clearly isn’t a matter of urgency, wait another week before giving him your answer.” “But I have the means to help him now. What difference will a week make?” “A very great difference indeed. Experience has taught me that people only give value to a thing if they have, at some point, been un-certain as to whether or not they’ll get it.

I had been for some hours extremely pressed by the necessities of nature; which was no wonder, it being almost two days since I had last disburdened myself. I was under great difficulties between urgency and shame. The best expedient I could think of, was to creep into my house, which I accordingly did; and shutting the gate after me, I went as far as the length of my chain would suffer, and discharged my body of that uneasy load.

One of the supreme paradoxes of baseball, and all sports, is that the harder you try to throw a pitch or hit a ball or accomplish something, the smaller your chances are for success. You get the best results not when you apply superhuman effort but when you let the game flow organically and allow yourself to be fully present. You'll often hear scouts say of a great prospect, "The game comes slow to him." It mean the prospect is skilled and poised enough to let the game unfold in its own time, paying no attention to the angst or urgency or doubt, funnelling all awareness to the athletic task at hand.

Your brand will be called on upon when it's needed. When it's not needed at the moment, keep it safely till it's call comes. Some brands shine occasionally!

Delays and laziness are the two great gulfs in which multitudes of souls are drowned and perish.

A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.

in time-wasting loops and diversions. Its changes of direction are frequently teasing: on its journey it heads at different times north, south, and west, as though it has forgotten its easterly destination—or put it aside for the while. At Ashton Keynes it splits into so many rivulets that every house in the village must have a bridge to its own front door; later, around Oxford, it takes a great unhurried detour around the city. It has other capricious tricks up its sleeve: in places it slows to drift lazily in wide pools before recovering its urgency and speeding on again. At Buscot it splits into twin streams to maroon a lengthy piece of territory, then regathers its water into a single channel. If this is hard to understand from a map, the rest is harder. For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the

When we rely deeply on other lives, there is an urgency to protect them. Our ancestors, who had so few material possessions, devoted a great of attention to this question, while we are drowning in possessions scarcely give it a thought.

I contemplated her, seeing her young bland face looking at me, now removed as if behind a gauze curtain. She quietly invited me to suffer. There was a great space now, a great silent hall in which this suffering could take place. There was no urgency now, nothing to plan, nothing to achieve. What shall I do with it, I asked her, what shall I do now with my love for you which you so terribly revived by reappearing in my life? Why did you come back, if you could not content me? What can I do now with the great useless machine of my love which has no wholesome work to do? I can do nothing for you any more, my darling. I wondered if I would be fated to live with this love, making of it a shrine which could not now be desecrated. Perhaps when I was living alone and being everyone's uncle like a celibate priest I would keep this fruitless love as my secret chapel. Could I then learn to love uselessly and unpossessively and would this prove to be the monastic mysticism which I had hoped to attain when I came away to the sea?

Human beings are built for empathy—built to absorb and experience the pain of others. Adrenaline, urgency, the forward momentum of the work, all of those things can propel you when you’re in the thick of it. But when that stops and the world stills, it matters not how great the victory. You feel the losses sustained along the way. And the exhaustion.

Experience can be a proxy for aptitude but not a perfect one. People that have been with successful companies are often swept along in the vortex of the company's momentum. The aura of a great company can rub off on its employees, to the point that it can be hard to separate the company's success from the employee's. We've mistakenly hired some passengers this way, thinking they were drivers.

The world is broken up by tribalism—the British, the German, the Swiss, the Hindu, the Buddhist, are tribes. See the fact that they are tribes, glorified as nations, and that this tribalism is creating havoc in the world, bringing wars in the world. Each tribe thinks in its own culture opposed to other cultures. But tribalism is the root, not the culture. Observing the fact of that is the action that frees the brain from the condition of tribalism. You see actually, not theoretically or ideationally, the fact that tribalism glorified as nations is one of the causes of war. That is a fact. There are other causes of war, economics and so on, but one of the causes is tribalism. When you see that, perceive that, and see that cannot bring about peace, the very perception frees the brain from its conditioning of tribalism. One of the factors of contention throughout the world is religion. You are a Catholic, I am a Muslim, based on ideas, propaganda of hundreds or thousands of years; the Hindu and the Buddhist ideas are of thousands of years. We have been programmed like a computer. That programming has brought about great architecture, great paintings, great music, but it has not brought peace to mankind. When you see the fact of that, you do not belong to any religion. When there are half a dozen gurus in the same place, they bring about misery, contradiction, conflict: “My guru is better than yours; my group is more sanctified than yours; I have been initiated, you have not.” You know all the nonsense that goes on. So when you see all this around you as an actual fact, then you do not belong to any group, to any guru, to any religion, to any political commitment of ideas. In the serious urgency to live peacefully there must be freedom from all this because they are the causes of dissension, division. Truth is not yours or mine. It does not belong to any church, to any group, to any religion. The brain must be free to discover it. And peace can exist only when there is freedom from fallacy. You know, for most of us, to be so drastic about things is very difficult, because we have taken security in things of illusion, in things that are not facts, and it is very difficult to let them go. It is not a matter of exercising will, or taking a decision: “I will not belong to anything” is another fallacy. We commit ourselves to some group, to an idea, to religious quackery, because we think it is some kind of security for us. In all these things there is no security, and therefore there is no peace. The brain must be secure; but the brain, with its thought, has sought security in things that are illusory.

Americans are a strange breed. We love to preach, and we hate being preached at. In one hemisphere of our brains the sermons of Cotton Mather run on an infinite loop; in the other we hear the echo of Mark Twain’s laughter. When the Twain side is napping the Mather side undergoes a Great Awakening. Surges of fevered fanaticism come over us, all sense of proportion is lost, and everything seems of an unbearable moral urgency. Repent, America, repent now! The country is undergoing such an Awakening at this very moment concerning race and gender, which is why the rhetoric being generated sounds evangelical rather than political. That one now hears the word woke everywhere is a giveaway that spiritual conversion, not political agreement, is the demand. Relentless speech surveillance, the protection of virgin ears, the inflation of venial sins into mortal ones, the banning of preachers of unclean ideas—all these campus identity follies have their precedents in American revivalist religion. Mr. Twain might have found it amusing but every opinion poll shows that the vast majority of Americans do not.

She leans back again against the pine’s trunk. Some slight change in the atmosphere, the humidity, and her mind becomes a greener thing. At midnight, on this hillside, perched in the dark above this city with her pine standing in for a Bo, Mimi gets enlightened. The fear of suffering that is her birthright—the frantic need to steer—blows away on the wind, and something else wings down to replace it. Messages hum from out of the bark she leans against. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet. The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again. They say: The air is a mix we must keep making. They say: There’s as much belowground as above. They tell her: Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life. There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still. The next day dawns. The sun rises so slowly that even the birds forget there was ever anything else but dawn. People drift back through the park on their way to jobs, appointments, and other urgencies. Making a living. Some pass within a few feet of the altered woman. Mimi comes to, and speaks her very first Buddha’s words. “I’m hungry.” The answer comes from right above her head. Be hungry. “I’m thirsty.” Be thirsty. “I hurt.” Be still and feel.

Remarkably, studies of visual perception have found that two-dimensional images projected onto the retina only achieve full dimensionality as a result of our perception: we infer the third dimension of depth. Sadly, though, as the urgency to expedite all communicative transactions usurps out customary patterns of exchange, perception is accelerated as well. There does not seem to be a great deal of time left over to infer--or interpret, or imagine--much of anything at all. In the end, of course, there is nothing real about this at all, except for our propensity to let it happen.

To leave the household, originally in order to embark upon some adventure and glorious enterprise and later simply to devote one’s life to the affairs of the city, demanded courage because only in the household was one primarily concerned with one’s own life and survival. Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness.30 Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence, and only those men who possessed it could be admitted to a fellowship that was political in content and purpose and thereby transcended the mere togetherness imposed on all—slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike—through the urgencies of life.31 The “good life,” as Aristotle called the life of the citizen, therefore was not merely better, more carefree or nobler than ordinary life, but of an altogether different quality. It was “good” to the extent that by having mastered the necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labor and work, and by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process. At

It says quite clearly that processes within the brain that trigger a hormone release can cause enormous effects on the body.” It says, that is, that what we think can change our bodies, that there is a quantifiable chemical link between mind and matter, spirit and body, imagination and reality. Spiritual leaders, great thinkers, artists have been saying this very thing for ages, but the fact that hardheaded, hard-research oriented neuroscientists are not just saying it but actually identifying and measuring the very neurochemicals that link idea with matter adds a new legitimacy and urgency to the idea.

The military authorities were concerned that soldiers going home on leave would demoralize the home population with horror stories of the Ostfront. ‘You are under military law,’ ran the forceful reminder, ‘and you are still subject to punishment. Don’t speak about weapons, tactics or losses. Don’t speak about bad rations or injustice. The intelligence service of the enemy is ready to exploit it.’ One soldier, or more likely a group, produced their own version of instructions, entitled ‘Notes for Those Going on Leave.’ Their attempt to be funny reveals a great deal about the brutalizing affects of the Ostfront. ‘You must remember that you are entering a National Socialist country whose living conditions are very different to those to which you have been accustomed. You must be tactful with the inhabitants, adapting to their customs and refrain from the habits which you have come to love so much. Food: Do not rip up the parquet or other kinds of floor, because potatoes are kept in a different place. Curfew: If you forget your key, try to open the door with the round-shaped object. Only in cases of extreme urgency use a grenade. Defense Against Partisans: It is not necessary to ask civilians the password and open fire upon receiving an unsatisfactory answer. Defense Against Animals: Dogs with mines attached to them are a special feature of the Soviet Union. German dogs in the worst cases bite, but they do not explode. Shooting every dog you see, although recommended in the Soviet Union, might create a bad impression. Relations with the Civil Population: In Germany just because someone is wearing women’s clothes does not necessarily mean that she is a partisan. But in spite of this, they are dangerous for anyone on leave from the front. General: When on leave back to the Fatherland take care not to talk about the paradise existence in the Soviet Union in case everybody wants to come here and spoil our idyllic comfort.

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

I feel it urgent to state that, if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother’s womb, that no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the “property” of another human being. The family protects human life in all its stages, including its last. Consequently, “those who work in healthcare facilities are reminded of the moral duty of conscientious objection. Similarly, the Church not only feels the urgency to assert the right to a natural death, without aggressive treatment and euthanasia”, but likewise firmly rejects the death penalty.

Heart-Centered—Every dream must be a HEART-CENTERED obsession that you are driven to achieve or acquire. You believe in your mind, but you know in your heart. HUNGRY people operate from their hearts! Unshakable Faith—Going after your dreams requires you to have UNSHAKABLE FAITH. It doesn’t really matter what happens to you; it matters what happens in you. HUNGRY people live faith-inspired lives! NOW Urgency—You can’t get out of life alive, so “live each day as if it’s your last because one day it will be.” HUNGRY people live with a sense of NOW URGENCY! Grow Continuously—You don’t get out of life what you want, you get out of life what you are. To have something you’ve never had before, you must become something you’ve never been before. HUNGRY people GROW CONTINUOUSLY to become what they need to be! Relationship Impact—Relationships fall into one of two categories: nourishing relationships that bring out the best in you or toxic relationships that drain out the best of you. HUNGRY people are always asking themselves, “Who can I count on and who should I count out?” YES, LORD—HUNGER speaks to a calling deep within. You have greatness that is waiting for permission to show itself. HUNGRY people understand that their greatness is unleashed by saying YES, LORD!

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives—where the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and gray fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forgot all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the Invisible Power that had been the object of lip-worship and lip-resignation became visible, according to the imagery of the Hebrew poet, making the flames his chariot, and riding on the wings of the wind, till the mountains smoke and the plains shudder under the rolling fiery visitations. Often the good cause seems to lie prostrate under the thunder of relenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, and no angel is seen holding forth the crown and the palm branch. Then it is that the submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even in the eyes of frivolity life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of duty, and a religion shows itself which is something else than a private consolation.

As we trace the myth of the Goddess through her salvific guides, we are aware of a cohesive set of metaphors that suggest a family likeness, as though a great mirror has shattered, prismatically retaining the original image. Indeed, the way which wisdom appears in the Bible is by means of "reflective mythology"-not the representation of an actual myth, but by a theological appropriation of mythic language and patterns that have been repackaged from the pagan models. With the Goddesses Demeter and Isis, the myth of the Goddess takes on a greater urgency that resonates to our contemporary spiritual response to the Divine Feminine: we find a common theme of loss and finding, of seeking for pieces of the shattered mirror of the beloved. Only when the divine daughter or husband is found and reconstituted can earth function again. Kore and Osiris are lost and found again, but they cannot be reconstituted entirely as they were. It is with our own search for the Goddess. In the period of loss, exile, or death, something transformative has happened. In each of these saving stories, it is the urgency of love the enduring patience of the seeker that restores the beloved. These are the prime qualities of Sophia that remind us always that, though we do not see her face clearly because she is veiled or disguised, the Goddess accompanies us wherever we go.

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

Much more than skeleton, it is flash, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturb and alarm us – and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhists monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous than, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid, it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to „nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the dense macabre. „Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him”, we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flash which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard – if only for a moment – that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable. In other to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver to renunciation. In the sermon of futility which both of them preach to us happiness is identified with the destruction of our bounds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra! Blessed was the age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word „depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gain – say the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a „parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet is was a rare consolation to think that thousands of thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajnaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more then ever, we should build monasteries … for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exist a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.

Oh, man! man! man!" moaned Dean. "And it's not even the beginning of it-and now here we are at last going east together, we've never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE."Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, "Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there-and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! 'Well now,' " he mimicked, " 'I don't know-maybe we shouldn't get gas in that station. I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don't know, well I just don't feel like it anyway . . .' Man, you dig all this." He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they'd never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning, too.

The ten rules of ikigai We’ll conclude this journey with ten rules we’ve distilled from the wisdom of the long-living residents of Ogimi: Stay active; don’t retire. Those who give up the things they love doing and do well lose their purpose in life. That’s why it’s so important to keep doing things of value, making progress, bringing beauty or utility to others, helping out, and shaping the world around you, even after your “official” professional activity has ended. Take it slow. Being in a hurry is inversely proportional to quality of life. As the old saying goes, “Walk slowly and you’ll go far.” When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning. Don’t fill your stomach. Less is more when it comes to eating for long life, too. According to the 80 percent rule, in order to stay healthier longer, we should eat a little less than our hunger demands instead of stuffing ourselves. Surround yourself with good friends. Friends are the best medicine, there for confiding worries over a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day, getting advice, having fun, dreaming . . . in other words, living. Get in shape for your next birthday. Water moves; it is at its best when it flows fresh and doesn’t stagnate. The body you move through life in needs a bit of daily maintenance to keep it running for a long time. Plus, exercise releases hormones that make us feel happy. Smile. A cheerful attitude is not only relaxing—it also helps make friends. It’s good to recognize the things that aren’t so great, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in a world so full of possibilities. Reconnect with nature. Though most people live in cities these days, human beings are made to be part of the natural world. We should return to it often to recharge our batteries. Give thanks. To your ancestors, to nature, which provides you with the air you breathe and the food you eat, to your friends and family, to everything that brightens your days and makes you feel lucky to be alive. Spend a moment every day giving thanks, and you’ll watch your stockpile of happiness grow. Live in the moment. Stop regretting the past and fearing the future. Today is all you have. Make the most of it. Make it worth remembering. Follow your ikigai. There is a passion inside you, a unique talent that gives meaning to your days and drives you to share the best of yourself until the very end. If you don’t know what your ikigai is yet, as Viktor Frankl says, your mission is to discover it.

What is scarce? Surely time is scarce? This is true in the sense that we get only one life, but yet again there are ways in which competition and how we use our time can make us feel an artificial sense of time scarcity. Each time we are able to build on the work of others with confidence, each time we use the elements of life pulled from our commonwealth of agricultural knowledge, we bundle time, and so get the benefit of having multiple lifetimes. Each time nature uses genetic code that has been developed over millions of years, millions of years of development are collapsed into something that works in our lifetimes. Each time we add to that collection, we are putting our lifetimes' work into a useful form for the benefit of future generations. At the same time, yes, we each have only our own single lives in which to pursue happiness. The goal is to spend as much of that time in a framework of sharing abundance rather than having it squeezed into a life of scarcity and competition. In contrast, we need not look far to find lots of frustrating examples in which our time is treated as abundant when we would rather have it be valued as scarce. It happens each time we must stand in line at the DMV, fill out redundant forms at the hospital, reproduce others' efforts by spending time searching for knowledge or data that already exists somewhere, create a report that no one reads. In those cases, we are creating and living in artificial and unnecessary time scarcity. Time is indeed one of the most curious elements of life, especially since our lifetimes and those of plants and animals all move at different rates. We know, for example, that the urgency to address climate change is really on our human scale, not geologic scale. The Earth has been through greater upheavals and mass extinctions and will likely go through them again, but for the narrowest of narrow bands of human history on Earth, we require very specific conditions for us to continue to thrive as a species. To keep our planet within a habitable and abundant balance, we have, as Howard Buffet noted, only 'forty seasons' to learn and adjust. That is why building on one another's work is so important. One farmer can have the benefit of forty seasons and pass some of that experience down, but if 1,000 farmers do the same, there is the collective benefit of 1,000 years in a single year. If a million people participate, then a million years of collective experience are available. If we are then able to compound knowledge across generations and deepen our understanding of human and natural history, we add even greater richness. It is in this way of bundling our experiences for continual improvement, with compound interest, that time shifts from a scarce resource to being far less of a constraint, if not truly abundant. However, for time to be compounded, knowledge must be shared, and real resources, energy, and infrastructure must exist and function to support and grow our commonwealth of knowledge.

Lest we come to believe that the gospel and the resulting ministry of the gospel are about us, we need to behold our God. When we’re being tugged in a navel-gazing direction, we need to behold our God. When we’re anxious about the vision we had for our lives, we need to behold our God. When we’re content with how life is going and feel little urgency about anything, much less spiritual matters, we need to behold our God! We need to have the eyes of our hearts enlightened so we may know the hope to which he’s called us, our glorious inheritance, and the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us (Eph. 1:17–19).

Political elections give us the illusion of choice. Whether many parties compete or two predominate parties compete, the choice they offer is a false choice. Each party typically portrays itself as the solution, urgently warns that the opposing party (or parties) will bring catastrophe, and makes promises it knows it cannot keep. In just one thing are all parties united: the illusion that politicians have the answer to life’s difficulties. In that assertion is the problem. It is a false assertion that the government—whichever party is in power—will save us. Elections are choices between two (or several) false narratives. So long as we look to politicians and governments for our salvation, we will be disappointed. There is but one Savior: Jesus Christ. He is mighty to save if we will have Him. He will not deceive us and He will not force us to accept Him. He offers truth, deliverance, protection, and peace. We must vote in every election: that is the pragmatic and prudent thing to do so long as we live in this fallen and imperfect world. Because that is the case, we see elections for what they are: moments in time when false narrative shift, and therefore occasions to realign ourselves with the Great Governor, Jesus Christ, who alone can save us.

Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending, and recognize our depts to the global south. Of course none of this has a hope in hell unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as "people" under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the preexisting case for virtually every progressive demand not he books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

But a Red detests inactivity. Things must happen. Add to this a sense of constant urgency, and a great deal will get done.

By the spring of 1941, there was no longer any doubt that America was gearing up for war. In March, Roosevelt announced Lend-Lease aid to Great Britain, and in May, he declared a state of “unlimited national emergency.” Such support for Great Britain did nothing to ease American relations with Japan. In July, determined to stop further Japanese expansion beyond Indochina, the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands acted in concert to shut off the flow of raw materials upon which the Japanese war machine relied. The three countries instituted an embargo against Japan of oil, steel, and other strategic imports. Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States, closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, and recalled Major General Douglas MacArthur to active duty to defend the Philippines. Far from slowing Japan’s war-making capabilities, these actions, particularly the oil embargo, served only to increase the urgency Japan felt to subjugate China and gobble up oil and rubber from the East Indies. By

By the spring of 1941, there was no longer any doubt that America was gearing up for war. In March, Roosevelt announced Lend-Lease aid to Great Britain, and in May, he declared a state of “unlimited national emergency.” Such support for Great Britain did nothing to ease American relations with Japan. In July, determined to stop further Japanese expansion beyond Indochina, the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands acted in concert to shut off the flow of raw materials upon which the Japanese war machine relied. The three countries instituted an embargo against Japan of oil, steel, and other strategic imports. Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States, closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, and recalled Major General Douglas MacArthur to active duty to defend the Philippines. Far from slowing Japan’s war-making capabilities, these actions, particularly the oil embargo, served only to increase the urgency Japan felt to subjugate China and gobble up oil and rubber from the East Indies. By September, after a German U-boat fired a torpedo at the American destroyer Greer (DD-145) while it was on convoy duty in the North Atlantic, Roosevelt authorized a shoot-on-sight policy against U-boats. A month later, the destroyer Reuben James (DD-245) spotted a periscope too late and caught a torpedo that blew off its bow. The ship sank in five minutes. Out of a complement of 143 officers and men, only 44 enlisted men survived.

great execution can make a moderately successful strategy go a long way, but poor execution will fail even the most brilliant

Develop confidence in your own authority, not somebody else's. Great operators live, breathe, and own their strategies.

Now that sense of intellectual urgency has dissipated. Tolerance, relativism, the postmodern refusal to commit, the cultural triumph of uncertainty – all these rule out a repeat of the pyrotechnics in H3. Perhaps, too, there is currently so much specialization, and so many movements and fissures within higher education, that the important questions have been lost.

Fear is a great motivator, and urgency a great enhancer of skill.

So, let's summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending, and recognize our debts to the Global South

Except perhaps his way was wrong. Wyrn’s patience seemed only slightly greater than Dilaf’s—the three-month time limit proved that much. Suddenly Hrathen felt an extreme sense of urgency. Wyrn meant his words: Unless Hrathen converted Arelon, the country would be destroyed. “Great Jaddeth Below…” Hrathen whispered, invoking his deity’s name. Right or wrong, he didn’t want the blood of an entire kingdom—even a heretical one—on his hands. He must succeed.

The aura of a great company can rub off on its employees, to the point that it can be hard to separate the company's success from the employee's.

Ultimately, leaders are only as good as the people they surround themselves with. Once you get good at both hiring and firing, you are well on your way to great results and a thriving career.

Fast growth separates great companies from their competition.

Similarly, where our goals and dreams come from will determine whether we feel great about pursuing them or not. Like everything in this world, there is nothing inherently good or bad, only our thinking makes it so. Goals, dreams, and ambitions are not good or bad, so it's not really an either-or situation, but more about where those goals are coming from. There are two sources of goals: goals created out of inspiration and goals created out of desperation. When goals are created out of desperation, we feel a large sense of scarcity and urgency. It feels heavy, like a burden, we may even feel daunted by the colossal task we've just committed ourselves to, imposter syndrome and self-doubt begin to manifest, and we always feel like we never have enough time for anything. We go about our life frantically, desperately searching for answers and ways that we can accomplish our goal faster, always looking externally, never feeling enough or that we can ever get enough. Worst of all, if we happen to accomplish our goal, within a few hours or days afterwards, all of those same feelings of lack begin to resurface. We begin not feeling content with what we have done, unable to savor our accomplishments and because what we did never feels like it’s enough, we feel that same way about ourselves. Not knowing what else to do, we look around for guidance externally to see what others are doing and see they're continuing to do the same thing. Thus, we go ahead and proceed to set another goal out of desperation in an attempt to escape all of the negative feelings gnawing away at our soul. When we dig a little deeper into these types of goals we set, they are all typically “means goals” and not “end goals”. In other words, the goals we set in this state of desperation are all a means to an end. There's always a reason we want to accomplish the goal and it's always for something else. For example, we want to create a multi-million-dollar business because we want financial freedom, or we want to quit our job so that we can escape the stress and anxiety that comes from it. We feel like we HAVE to do these things instead of WANT to. Goals created from desperation are typically "realistic" and created from analyzing our past and what we think to be "plausible" in the moment. It feels very confining and limiting. Although these types of goals and dreams may excite us in the moment, as soon as we begin to try to create it, we feel a lack, and we are desperate to bring the dream to life. Paradoxically, if we do end up achieving a goal created out of desperation, we end up feeling even more empty than we did before it. The next "logical" thing we tend to do is to set an even bigger goal out of even greater desperation to hopefully make us feel whole inside.

[...] for the natural man, if he had not already been artificially corrupted, does have a sense of awe in face of the hidden mystery of being, in face of the ultimate origin and destiny of the world, of matter, of life, of evolution, of the fate of the individual and of humanity. Every religion, from the most primitive to most sophisticated, lives essentially on this awe. Goethe and Albert Schweitzer have given us great examples of such religion, and even the humanitarian world-views which today describe themselves as religionless draw their strength, at least in the cases where they do not publicly proclaim their cynicism and demonism, from a primal pathos. They have been gripped by a sense of the urgency of the task of reconciling man with the universal being of the world; hungering and thirsting after ultimate righteousness are not possible without a sense of awe in the face of the mystery of being.

someone aspiring to reach the greater potential of the human animal, is to widen your relationship to time as much as possible, and slow it down. This means you do not see the passage of time as an enemy but rather as a great ally. Each stage in life has its advantages—those of youth are most obvious, but with age comes greater perspective. Aging does not frighten you. Death is equally your friend (see chapter 18). It motivates you to make the most of each moment; it gives you a sense of urgency. Time is your great teacher and master.

First, the frenzy to buy art meant that paintings turned up out of nowhere, every day, and sold with no questions asked. Second, the Nazis had endless reserves of cash. Third, Hitler and Goering were rubes who fancied themselves connoisseurs. (In Goering’s case, at least, his chief art expert was no great shakes, either.) Fourth, the Nazis were not the only ones in the market. Faced with the hideous prospect of Dutch masterpieces falling into German hands, Holland’s art establishment and its great industrialists flung money at the sellers. Best of all, from a schemer’s point of view, all the wheeling-and-dealing went on at hyperspeed, with no time for reflection or second thoughts. With ordinary paintings, this urgency posed no great danger—faced with a middling work, one could make only a middling mistake. But make the purchase of a lifetime in haste and you might well make the mistake of a lifetime.

solutions is thus greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an equivalent for the world only so far as the world is simple,—the world meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily complex affair. Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the most invincible of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements of things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are men to think at all.

Gradually, as our perspective deepens, we begin to experience our own lives in the context of a wider purpose. We begin to look at all our melodramas and our desires and our sufferings, and instead of seeing them as events happening within a lifetime bounded by birth and death, we begin experiencing them as part of a much vaster design.We begin to appreciate that there is a wider frame around our lives, within which our particular incarnation is happening. One of the first things that kind of perspective does for us is to calm us down a great deal. The whole game isn’t riding on this one lifetime! Whew! There’s a great feeling of release inherent in that; it removes the anxiety and the sense of urgency. We don’t have to do it all right now—and in fact we see we’re not “doing it” anyway! It’s the lawful continuity of karma and reincarnation flowing through us lifetime after lifetime, kalpa after kalpa. What a relief!

Parenting is hard and spirituality is a tough topic to tackle with fewer resources if you don’t have a handle on it yourself. This is the question so many parents feel with such great urgency: What should I do and how should I do it?

It is late. We are deep in an emergency. But it is not too late, because the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We1 are deciding it now. The longer we wait to act, the more limited the options, but scientists tell us there are good options and great urgency to embrace them while we can. An emergency is when a stable situation destabilizes, when the house catches fire or the dam breaks or institution implodes, when the failure or sudden change or crisis calls for urgent response.

What makes Capa a great photo journalist?" asks a reporter covering a 1998 retrospective of his work. "We see his own appetite for life, his mix of urgency with compassion . . . the artistic thrust of his photography always had more to do with its emotional pitch, which remained genuine and deeply felt." Or, in Capa's own words, a great picture "is a cut out of the whole event which will show more of the real truth of the affair to some one who was not there than the whole scene.

Planning eliminates urgency by allowing you to bring your future into the present.

The thought that your time and your life will melt away should create a sense of urgency to do something of worth with it before it all melts away.

In the dim light he could see tears shimmering on her pale cheeks. He bent his head to catch their saltiness with the tip of his tongue. “Ah, Blue Eyes, ka taikay, ka taikay, don’t cry. Has my hand upon you ever brought pain?” “No,” she whispered brokenly. Determined to finish what he had begun, Hunter swept her slender body into his arms and strode to the bed. Lowering her gently onto the fur, he stretched out beside her and gathered her close, his manhood throbbing with urgency against the confining leather of his pants. He half expected her to struggle, and perhaps if she had, he could have continued, his one thought to consummate their marriage, to put her fears behind them and ease the ache in his loins. But instead of fighting him, she wrapped her slender arms around his neck and clung to him, so rigid with fear that she felt brittle, her limbs quivering almost uncontrollably. In a voice thick with tears, she said, “Hunter--would you do one thing for me? Just one small thing. Please?” He splayed a hand on her back and felt the wild hammering of her heart. “What thing, Blue Eyes?” “Would you get it over with quickly? Please? I won’t ever ask again, I swear it. Just this time, please?” Hunter buried a smile in her hair and closed his eyes, tightening his arms around her. His father’s voice whispered. Fear is not like dust on a leaf that can be washed away by a gentle rain. The words no sooner came to him than a dozen forgotten memories did as well. For an instant the years rolled away, and Hunter saw himself running hand in hand with Willow by the Stream through a meadow of red daisies, their laughter ringing across the windswept grass, their eyes shining with love as they drank in the sight of one another. He remembered so many things in that instant--the love, yes, but mostly he remembered the friendship he and Willow had shared, the trust, the silliness, the laughter. Ah, yes, the laughter…He and his little blue-eyes had laughed together so few times that Hunter had difficulty recalling when they had. Suddenly he knew that without the laughter, their loving would fall far short of what it should be. Especially for her. In a voice that rasped with frustration as well as tender amusement, Hunter said, “You have such a great want for me that we must hurry, yes?

Loretta didn’t realize she had drifted off to sleep until she awoke to the delicious warmth of Hunter’s lips on her throat. She opened her eyes slowly, registering his presence beside her. A shaft of moonlight coming through the smoke hole gilded the broad shoulders that canopied hers. His solid chest, warm and silken, pinned her against soft fur. A wonderfully hard arm encircled her, his broad wrist pressed against her spine, his long fingers fanning between her shoulder blades. She let her head fall back to accommodate his caressing mouth. “Hi, hites,” she whispered. “Hello,” he murmured against her ear, sending spirals of longing down her spine. Coming aware by degrees, Loretta tucked in her chin to glance down, shocked to see her white skin glowing in the moonlight. It was shameless to be lying next to him like this. She tensed, but the brush of his lips along her throat robbed her of the will to move. Not that she could have if she tried. There was an urgency in the way he held her, a tautness in his body. His hips moved forward against hers, leaving her in no doubt that he wanted her, again. “Hunter…what about Amy? It’s dark outside.” “I tied the flap closed. She will go to my mother.” His voice was husky, throbbing. He slid his hand down her back to her bottom and drew her firmly against him. His hardness jabbed her abdomen, and she flinched. He drew back and looked down at her, his eyes shot with silver in the moonlight. “You hurt?” Loretta knew he had gone to great lengths to be gentle with her earlier, but she was sore nonetheless. The ache was to be expected, she felt sure, and probably would disappear in a day or two. “I’m fine.” He slid his hand to her belly, his strong fingers probing carefully, his gaze alert on her face for telltale signs of pain. “Ah, Blue Eyes, I think you lie.” His gentleness and concern touched her. “It isn’t that bad, truly. If you want to--” Heat flooded her cheeks as the impropriety of what she had nearly said struck her. His mouth quirked in a knowing grin. “This Comanche has much want, but I will wait.

As the years go by and I grow older, I feel compelled to record my experiences in wartime Germany. It is important that my children, grandchildren and future generations know about the difficult times we all endured and of the horrors that existed in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Due to my advanced age and present condition, I am aware of the urgency to document my memories. If I fail in this, I will fail those who follow me, for they will never know!” Adeline Perry This book had its origin many years ago when Adeline Perry tried to recount her experiences and found that she would become overcome by her emotions every time she tried. The horrors and trials that she had experienced, plus the responsibility of raising her two daughters proved to be overwhelming. It was not until the twilight of her life when her daughters gently persuaded her to try again so that future generations might hear and perhaps learn from her experiences. In fact a good portion of these manuscripts were written while she was in the care of Hospice and only now survive because of immense personal strength and devotion to her family and the desire that what had happened to her would never happen again. Her daughter, and my wife, Ursula can take a great deal of pride in the effort it took to make these manuscripts a reality. After Adeline’s passing I had the privilege to develop the book Suppressed I Rise. Staying true to her story I gave her the authorship of the first edition of this book, which adhered to, and did not exceed what she had left in her original manuscripts. This book which was printed in limited numbers became an instant success and deserved more exposure. Readers also felt that there were questions that went unanswered requiring a follow-up. How did Adeline justify going to Germany prior to World War II? What happened to her marriage to Richard and how did she resume her own life, as a single mother, when she returned to South Africa! With additional reflections by her daughters Brigitte Grigsby and Ursula Bracker, and travel to the areas discussed in Suppressed I Rise, I expanded the book to include the prewar years. I also corrected minor contradictions and factual discrepancies that were inadvertently caused by the passage of time. Talking to people in Germany I confirmed some of what had happened including the hanging of the Russian prisoner of war. The book has now become a powerful example of not only personal courage but also of human tragedy. It is a book that I am proud to have written and share in the concept that it was a story that had to be told.

Not an “Issue,” a Frame” “The link between challenging corruption and lowering emissions is just one example of how the climate emergency could—by virtue of its urgency and the fact that it impacts, well, everyone on earth—breathe new life into a political goal for which there is already a great deal of public support. The same holds true for many of the other issues discussed so far—from raising taxes on the rich to blocking harmful new trade deals to reinvesting in the public sphere. But before those kinds of alliances can be built, some very bad habits will need to be abandoned. Environmentalists have a long history of behaving as if no issue is more important than the Big One—why, some wonder (too often out loud), is everyone wasting their time worrying about women’s rights… when it’s blindingly obvious that none of this matters if the planet decides to start ejecting us for poor behavior? When the first Earth Day was declared in 1970, one of the movement’s leaders, Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, declared that the environmental crisis made “Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities, and all other major problems one could name . . . relatively insignificant by comparison.” Which helps explains why the great radical journalist I. F. Stone described Earth Day as “a gigantic snowjob” that was using “rock and roll, idealism and non-inflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns which might really threaten our power structure. They were both wrong. The environmental crisis—if conceived sufficiently broadly—neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency.

If this were some kind of entertainment, this would be roughly the point where Rupert said, "We don't have any more time, Professor, you must complete your research as soon as possible," but there was no great sense of urgency, no sense that it even mattered. It was just something that Rudi was interested in, for his own reasons. They could be working on this for years and still not understand it, and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. He said, "Look, Professor, a lot of effort went into getting you that information. We'd be grateful if you could make some kind of sense of it reasonably soon. "There is one thing I can tell you right now," Lev said..."Whoever is running this thing, they're really interested in railways.

1. You must lead from the front. Always. 2. Speed is everything. There must be a sense of urgency. 3. Listen to the locals. They often know more than the Nobel Prize Laureates. 4. Don’t wait for federal agencies to tell you what to do ... tell them what you need. 5. Keep the public informed on the details. Do it early and often and without fanfare. Transparency inspires confidence. Confidence inspires cohesion. 6. Make quick decisions when plans fail. They will fail. As the saying goes, “No battle plan completely survives the first shot.” 7. Demand and expect excellence. There is no reason government cannot function in a competent manner. Refuse to accept failure. 8. Ignore the politics, focus on doing a good job. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. If you do a good job, that will all take care of itself. If you don’t, there is no amount of PR that will help you. 9. Read the old playbook, then throw it out and get ready to improvise. 10. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst, immediately. Assume you are at the Alamo. If you end up attacking an ant hill with a sledge hammer ... that’s okay. But if you end up bringing a knife to a gun fight ... that’s a failure. If you prepare for war and peace breaks out, great! But if you prepare for peace and war breaks out, you’re in trouble!

Paul’s praying and his commands and the urgency with which he pressed upon the Church to pray, is the most convincing proof of the absolute necessity of prayer as a great moral force in the world, an indispensable and inalienable factor in the progress and spread of the Gospel, and in the development of personal piety.

Faithful churches, in other words, seek to grow deep and wide. Pursuing width without depth creates audiences instead of churches; but pursuing depth without width fails to take the urgency of the Great Commission seriously.

North American church continues to blur the meaning of the word “missions” such that it encompasses anything the church does outside the four walls of its building. The problem with calling everything the church does by the term “missions” is that it dilutes the urgency of prioritizing the church’s task toward those who currently have no access to the gospel.

As much as possible, connect your offer to the direct benefits customers will receive. Like the Alaska coupon books, a compelling offer pays for itself by making a clear value proposition. What people want and what they say they want are not always the same thing; your job is to figure out the difference. When developing an offer, think carefully about the objections and then respond to them in advance. Provide a nudge to customers by getting them to make a decision. The difference between a good offer and a great offer is urgency (also known as timeliness): Why should people act now? Offer reassurance and acknowledgment immediately after someone buys something or hires you. Then find a small but meaningful way to go above and beyond their expectations.

At this point in the evolution of the ST it would not occur to anyone that such an operation that violated the sovereignty of another country or that was patently a case of “interference in the internal affairs of another nation” should not be carried out without some formal sanction from the host government. The idea of fighting Communism had become so blindly accepted that they began to forget that such activity was properly a “clandestine operation” and should not be performed lightly. The feeling of urgency and of an almost missionary zeal to combat and root out real or imagined subversive insurgency anywhere was such that the great importance of national sovereignty was all but overlooked.

Examples for warm-market prospects: “You’ve been very successful and I’ve always respected the way you’ve done business.” “You’ve always been supportive of me and I appreciate that so much.” (Great to use with family and close friends.) “You have an amazing mind for business and can see things other people don’t see.” “For as long as I’ve known you, I’ve thought you were the best at what you do.” Examples for cold-market prospects: “You’ve given me some of the best service I’ve ever received.” “You are super sharp. Can I ask what you do for a living?” “You’ve made this a fantastic experience.” The key to the compliment is, it must be sincere. Find something you can honestly use to compliment your prospect and use it. This simple step will literally double your invitation results. When you start with urgency and a compliment, it becomes very difficult for a person to react negatively to your invitation. People don’t hear compliments very often. It feels good. You will find your prospects will become very receptive.

Thank goodness you’re not dead, my dear,” Abigail began, stopping a few feet away from Lucetta. “I was certain you were going to drown when you went into the moat the first time, given that you were wearing such a heavy coat. But wasn’t it just so fortunate that my grandson was there to jump in and rescue you?” The reason behind the lack of urgency in Abigail getting to Lucetta immediately became clear. Shooting a glance to the man she’d assumed was the gardener—although the quality of his shirt should have been an indication he was nothing of the sort—Lucetta turned back to Abigail. “This is your grandson?” Abigail sent her a less than subtle wink. “Too right he is.” To Lucetta’s absolute relief, the grandson in question stepped forward before Abigail had an opportunity to begin waxing on about what a dish her grandson had turned out to be, a subject that would have embarrassed Lucetta no small amount, and probably the grandson as well. “Grandmother, this is certainly an unexpected surprise,” the man who was apparently Bram Haverstein said. Abigail beamed a smile Bram’s way and held out her hands, her beaming increasing when Bram immediately strode to her side, picked up both of her hands, and kissed them. “I’m sure you are surprised to see me, dear, just as I’m sure you meant to say delightful surprise, not unexpected, but enough about that. Even though you and Lucetta are dripping wet, we mustn’t ignore the expected pleasantries, so do allow me to formally introduce the two of you. Bram, this is my darling friend, Miss Lucetta Plum, and Lucetta, dear, this is my grandson, the one I’ve been telling you so much about, Mr. Bram Haverstein.” Trepidation was immediate when Bram flashed a big smile her way. Rising to her feet, Lucetta inclined her head. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Haverstein.” “The pleasure is mine, Miss Plum,” Bram responded as he moved right up beside her and took her hand firmly in his, the heat from his skin sending a jolt of what she could only assume was alarm straight up her arm. “Do know that I’m a great, great admirer of your work.” Her sense of alarm promptly increased. Gentlemen who had no qualms admitting they were great, great admirers of her work were known to be rather . . . zealous. The very last circumstance Lucetta needed, or wanted for that matter, was to add another great admirer to her unwanted collection of them. Disappointment stole through her as Mr. Haverstein lifted her hand to his lips and placed a lingering kiss on her knuckles, that disappointment increasing when he lowered her hand and began speaking. “I must admit that I do think your role in The Lady of the Tower is your best to date. Why, I’ve come to the conclusion that Mr. Grimstone, the playwright, obviously had you in mind to play the part of Serena Seamore from the moment he began penning the story.” Abigail, apparently realizing that her grandson was not making a favorable impression—which certainly wouldn’t aid her matchmaking attempt—squared her shoulders, looking quite determined. “How lovely to discover you’re already familiar with my dear Lucetta and her work,” Abigail said. “But as both of you are dripping wet and certain to catch a cold if we linger, I’m going to suggest we repair to the castle and leave further talk of, uh, theater behind us.” She

The best BHAGs make you think big. They force you to engage in both long-term building and short-term intensity. The only way to achieve a BHAG is with a relentless sense of urgency, day after day, week after week, month after month, for years. What do you need to do today, with monomaniacal focus, and tomorrow and the next day and the day after that to defy the probabilities and ultimately achieve your BHAG?

I want to highlight and celebrate the world-changing impact that formerly incarcerated people can have when they are placed in environments where their energies can be used to not merely survive but thrive. There must be a fundamental shift in the core of what we believe about justice. There is no doubt that laws need to change. Unduly harsh sentencing laws have caused untold misery at great expense. But systemic change does not all have to come from Congress or state legislators who move with no sense of urgency even when human lives are at stake. Systemic change can also come from directly impacted people when they are out of survival mode and have access to opportunity.

I’ve puzzled for years over the question of why some companies fail to adapt quickly enough to what Clayton Christensen called “disruptive innovation,” while others don’t. Reflecting on cases in our research studies, I’ve concluded that the primary answer is really quite simple—failure to apply productive paranoia, not just in the short term, but also with a fifteen-plus-year time frame. When executive teams visit my management lab in Boulder, I often ask them the following three questions: What significant changes in your world (both inside your company and in the external environment) are you highly confident will have happened by fifteen years from now? Which of those changes pose a significant or existential threat to your company? What do you need to begin doing now—with urgency—to march ahead of those changes?

Whether we are digging wild leeks or going to the mall, how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take? In our oldest stories, we are reminded that this was a questions of profound concern for our ancestors. When we rely deeply on other lives, there is urgency to protect them. Our ancestors, who had so few material possessions, devoted a great deal of attention to this qauestion, while we who are drowning in possessions scarcely give it a thought. The cultural landscape may have changed, but the conundrum has not - the need to resolve the inescapable tension between honoring life around us and taking it in order to live is part of being human.

Old Testament poetry and especially Old Testament wisdom evoke a world charged with God’s grandeur as the Creator and redeemer. In the process of evoking this world, Old Testament wisdom invites, cajoles and even commands us to live our lives consciously in this world. Biblical poetry is never poetry for poetry’s sake. Yet it is still aesthetic and to be savored as such. Its creativity with words, sounds and images gives it its evocative and memorable powers. All of these wisdom books naturally became a part of the traditions in the home, the community and at festival gatherings. Each book thus generated a formative presence in the cultural consciousness of God’s people. In sum, we simply will not hear God’s address through Old Testament wisdom if we fail to attend closely to its poetic character. Here is a brief look at each of the books studied in the following chapters. Proverbs. Proverbs 1–9 is a highly symbolic collection of sayings from two very different sources: Woman Wisdom and the parents of a maturing son. The son is a realistic but fictional character entering the actual world adults encounter day to day. Woman Wisdom, however, is a fictional and cosmic character who, as wisdom personified, beckons the son to desire her ways and paths. This may be a complex way of getting at what’s going on in all of the imagery, but it alerts us to the great power of biblical art. The mysterious woman character creates the symbolic and allusive points of view introduced above. The point is not for the young man to believe that this woman is a human; rather, he is drawn to make the theological and experiential connections between God’s created purpose and the world he will soon enter as an adult. The woman’s cosmic, feminine character attaches urgency and emotion to the simple actions of life in this world, for they will be played out before God within the deep, mysterious, cosmic order he has formed.

Perfect balance in sales is combining sense of urgency to close deals with great patience to listen, understand and act in a customer's best interest.

The ten rules of ikigai We’ll conclude this journey with ten rules we’ve distilled from the wisdom of the long-living residents of Ogimi: 1. Stay active; don’t retire. Those who give up the things they love doing and do well lose their purpose in life. That’s why it’s so important to keep doing things of value, making progress, bringing beauty or utility to others, helping out, and shaping the world around you, even after your “official” professional activity has ended. 2. Take it slow. Being in a hurry is inversely proportional to quality of life. As the old saying goes, “Walk slowly and you’ll go far.” When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning. 3. Don’t fill your stomach. Less is more when it comes to eating for long life, too. According to the 80 percent rule, in order to stay healthier longer, we should eat a little less than our hunger demands instead of stuffing ourselves. 4. Surround yourself with good friends. Friends are the best medicine, there for confiding worries over a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day, getting advice, having fun, dreaming … in other words, living. 5. Get in shape for your next birthday. Water moves; it is at its best when it flows fresh and doesn’t stagnate. The body you move through life in needs a bit of daily maintenance to keep it running for a long time. Plus, exercise releases hormones that make us feel happy. 6. Smile. A cheerful attitude is not only relaxing—it also helps make friends. It’s good to recognize the things that aren’t so great, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in a world so full of possibilities. 7. Reconnect with nature. Though most people live in cities these days, human beings are made to be part of the natural world. We should return to it often to recharge our batteries. 8. Give thanks. To your ancestors, to nature, which provides you with the air you breathe and the food you eat, to your friends and family, to everything that brightens your days and makes you feel lucky to be alive. Spend a moment every day giving thanks, and you’ll watch your stockpile of happiness grow. 9. Live in the moment. Stop regretting the past and fearing the future. Today is all you have. Make the most of it. Make it worth remembering. 10. Follow your ikigai. There is a passion inside you, a unique talent that gives meaning to your days and drives you to share the best of yourself until the very end. If you don’t know what your ikigai is yet, as Viktor Frankl says, your mission is to discover it.

There is hatred, there is pain, there is bigotry There are those who try to steal human dignity The strength to love or the path of war Which one of these will you be fighting for? The more they have, the more they take The first and final great mistake To the ends of the Earth and back again The human race leaves a human stain We must shake off our complacency Live life that’s filled with urgency To the beauty, to the wonder of it all Don’t bow your head, don’t break, don’t fall Take control

Late one June afternoon, seven months after my wedding, I woke from a short, deep sleep, in love with my husband. I did not know then, lying in bed and looking out the window at the line of gray clouds, that my love would last only a few hours and that I would never again care for Rajinder with the same urgency - never again in the five homes we would share and through the two daughters and one son we would also share, though unevenly and with great bitterness. I did not know this then, suddenly awake and only twenty-six, with a husband not much older, nor did I know that the memory of the coming hours would periodically overwhelm me throughout my life.

Whenever talent is in short supply, as it almost always is in Silicon Valley, betting on aptitude is a great recruiting strategy for employers, albeit a less certain one. You can hire people ahead of their own development curve and inspire them to grow into challenging new roles.

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.

His words carried great urgency, as if his house would catch fire if he didn't speak fast enough.

Over the years, I’ve found that great ventures are set apart by a handful of factors: technical excellence, an outstanding team, reasonable financing, and laser focus—on either a large, existing market or a rapidly growing new one. Finally, a standout venture needs that paradoxical combination of persistence, patience, and urgency. Few young companies possess all of these qualities, especially at the start. The winners develop them over time.

In this context Mugabe was eager to maintain the loyalty of key allies, particularly in the security services. As the economy at home shrunk, so did opportunities for domestic patronage. The Congo war provided the opportunity he needed to keep his collaborators happy and busy elsewhere. This explains the urgency with which the Congolese and Zimbabweans set up their joint ventures and how easily Zimbabwean officials

20. Develop a sense of urgency: Make a habit of moving fast on your key tasks. Become known as a person who does things quickly and well.

In my experience, most sales shortfalls reflect either an inadequate product or a disconnect between the product and the target market. In other words, what you're offering doesn't resonate with the people you expected to like it. A strong product will generate escape velocity and find its market, even with a mediocre sales team. But even a great sales team cannot fix or compensate for product problems.