Urgent or Important?

Or Ouch!

In my personal life right now I am learning the hard way the difference between urgent and important.

I am assuming that most of you are like me: my day is filled with “urgent” tasks – like paying a bill or removing my winter tires – so much so that I often don’t around to the important stuff that is usually has large but future ramifications. So I sort of do the important job.. but not really to the degree that it deserves, because doing the “urgent” stuff is, well, urgent – and usually satisfying in that I get it done and feel good about myself… until the important task bites me and feel a lot of pain – like I do right now. Ouch. So today I’d like to explore why we must set up our lives such that we have the time and attention to tell the difference urgent and important and then act upon it. Now that means that I do not see the traditional Eisenhower matrix as relevant to either my personal situation of the world situation; Instead of urgent AND important I see our challenge as primarily urgent OR important. The context, as always, is our continuing focus on “urgent” issues like the mad war between Israel/USA & Iran instead of “important” issues like the destruction of our biosphere and poisoning of our bodies that accompanies that death wish.

Hey, I know things are scary right now but don’t panic. It’s going to get worse.

First, let’s start off with a headline that connects these two issues. It may interest you to note that this was written before the current war and that the environmental issues of poor air quality and lack of water have only accelerated with the war.

Environmental Collapse Is Forcing Iran to Move Its Capital

Facing record drought, sinking land, and ecological collapse, Iran says it has “no choice.”

Tehran is literally sinking. Faced with exhausted aquifers, choking pollution, and a landscape that can no longer support its population, Iran’s president has announced a historic and desperate plan to move the nation’s capital to the coast. The collapse of Tehran’s aquifers has long been predicted. “We saw this coming,” says Darío Solano, a geoscientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, as per Scientific American. But years of overpumping, poor planning, and corruption accelerated the decline. “It’s a perfect storm of climate change and corruption.” [1]

Just to be clear – this is not a “1 off”. This avoidable sad disaster in happening in other cities, like Jakarta. Like Iran, Indonesia is moving its capital. Why? Environmental degradation and disastrous, short sighted actions that have made Jakarta unliveable.

Jakarta is home to about 10 million people and three times that number in the greater metropolitan area. It has been described as the world’s most rapidly sinking city, and at the current rate, it is estimated that one-third of the city could be submerged by 2050. The main cause is uncontrolled ground water extraction, but it has been exacerbated by the rising Java Sea due to climate change. Its air and groundwater are heavily polluted, it floods regularly and its streets are so clogged that its estimated congestion costs the economy $4.5 billion a year. President Joko Widodo envisions the construction of a new capital as a nostrum for the problems plaguing Jakarta, reducing its population while allowing the country to start fresh with a “sustainable city.” [2]

You get the idea. There is lots of bad news like this, if you care to look for it, that is important but does make the headlines because its not urgent… except for those directly affected. As David Suzuki said recently: “It’s Too Late: the Fight Against Climate Change Is Lost”.[3] But what do most of us do? React appropriately by shifting our attention from gossip or war headlines? Certainly not. Why is that, when the future survival of billions is at stake? Just for fun, let’s share some more news that is important but not urgent [at least not for the super rich and powerful decision makers who serve them] to emphasize that we are in a time in History that requires us to move our attention from urgent to important:

Tornado Alley Is MOVING from low to high population density areas [4]

The U ntold Truth Why Phoenix Will Collapse [5]

We need to go back a few steps to answer today’s question. I think part of our cognitive challenge is ambiguity and our inability to connect our feelings to our thinking. Ever had that feeling that things are really, really serious – and yet you have no proof? Sure, there are signs that things are “a little off” but hey! Why panic? Why freak out? Because if you do most folks will think you’re a nut case. An extremists. A fanatic. And worst of all, a negative, cynical party pooper. But the problem is sometimes those feelings in your gut are right. You “know” its true, but in a way where logic and words and cause-effect relationships don’t work. It’s like you “know” in your bones, in your unconscious and that knowing is unable to filter up into the explicit world of the conscious. That doesn’t make it wrong. That doesn’t make it invalid. It just means you cannot act properly upon it. And if you act Improperly about it and proclaim that you now know consciously when you actually only know unconsciously….well, to put it mildly, things don’t work out for you. You have mud on your face.

So, given the risks in this scenario, what do most of us [including me] do? Nothing. We bottle our feelings and unconscious knowing within. We have nightmares about it. But we don’t act. We’re just like Hamlet who “knows” that this Father in Law murdered his Father but because his proof is the words of ghost only acts when its too late. Well, not too late to kill his murderous Father in Law, but too late not to follow him in death.

What I wonder is this: are most of like Hamlet? Is our entire way of Life like Hamlet? We know, albeit unconscioulsy, that how we are living it killing the planet and ourselves and our kids but we don’t act. We rationalize our inaction by telling ourselves: “It can’t possibly be that bad.” or “It’s impossible that I am right and most of the world is wrong so I must be wrong and the Business As Usual {BAU] world must be right. In other words we succumb to the intense social pressure to be “normal”. We lack courage. We are gutless. Our convictions are pathetic and weak.

Am I being a bit harsh in my condemnations? Probably. But that’s the mood I am in right now, a mood based on painful and personal experiences. What I feel right now is that we are committing suicide. Like all suicides there are warnings that things are “off”. Lots of them. But do we notice and by noticing I mean not just intellectually but deep within our bodies, do we notice? This kind of noticing accompanies a change in attitude and behaviour. The honest answer? No… except for a few us.

Take the author of Jem Bendell, who in 2018 wrote the now famous paper Deep Adaption: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy”, [6] in which he argued that mainstream climate adaptation strategies assume society can continue as usual, whereas he emphasized the possibility, or even inevitability, of near-term societal collapse due to climate disruption, extreme weather, and environmental degradation. The term “deep” reflects the need for profound personal, social, and systemic changes, beyond conventional sustainability measures. He totally changed his life after the shock of realizing that all the “urgent” tasks he was working on were not “Important”. In fact, he quit his job as a professor in England and he quit to launch an organic farm school, Bekandze Farm, in Indonesia. You and I can do the same. We can change our lives to discover a place to be and a task to do that we consider important, given who we are and our limitations. We can, once we work to shift our attention from urgent to important, life a rich and good life that is future directed, a life where “I win” because of the gifts I give to the future. We all know that we are merely a single link in the great chain of life, but the perception that you and I are “merely” link is deceptive because the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. You matter. We all matter – if we become a strong link in the chain that works to make future life possible. To do that requires lots of quiet time thinking, feeling, acting and if you so inclined meditating and praying. All of these activities, can, in my experience, allow you to tolerate the uncomfortableness of not knowing but acting decisively in spite of it.

After all is said and done the question remains:

Are we too late? No.

Is disaster upon us. Yes.

Will it hurt? Yes.

Can we – eventually – not only survive but thrive? Yes.

But it’s going to take what seems like miracle for that to happen. I don’t find that unreasonable because the fact that life exists at all is miracle. Ask an evolutionary Biologist. Existence itself is a miracle. Ask a Physicist. Every day you wake up smiling is a miracle. So do what all sane people do – make miracles happen and suddenly miracles are simply the highly, highly improbable that become normal because of our paying attention to what important instead of the urgent busyness that clutters our lives. Jem Bendell did it and you and I can do it too.

People who think and feel and pray deeply develop a high tolerance for ambiguity