what makes it challenging to think clearly about urgency and patience?

This is my seventh piece exploring what it means to lead with love. See the other pieces at the links below:

#1: learning love: a beginning

#2: what does it mean to be love?

#3: how do we lead with love through our mistakes?

#4: what is wrong with urgency? What is beautiful about patience?

#5: how do we model patience?

#6: when do we need urgency?

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In saying that we need urgency AND patience strategically deployed in different situations, I am saying something that in my experience, people hate: it depends.

“It depends” is the worst – it basically means that there are no shortcuts; that we have to think about each situation within its context and decide how much urgency or patience it demands.

There are a couple of challenges that an ‘it depends’ approach hands us.

1. The biggest one is that it can be exhausting to evaluate each situation for the right answer, and so we wind up defaulting to whatever our “hard-wired” impulse might be. If we have a bias for action, we might favor urgency. If we have a status quo bias, then we might favor patience. So – we need to know where our instinct lies and pay attention to it. We need to build our muscles of listening to our body pulling us to action or inaction as a knee-jerk reaction. We need to learn to pause to consider the situation and context against our values, kids, and faculty might need, and our role, and deciding with context what the most appropriate way forward might be.
2. It’s hard to feel validated in a world where it depends. In Taylor Swift’s April 2026 interview with The New York Times Magazine on her songwriting process, one of the ideas that stood out to me was that even if she really loved a song or an album she created, a fan might need months or years before their experiences/life resonate with a particular song. She says, “I learned that you can’t even tell if other people are going to like it, but oftentimes when I love it to a certain degree, that kind of tends to matchup with people. And it could be that it doesn’t match up with the way people feel until 6 years later…” Similarly, when we make decisions about when to practice urgency and when to practice patience, we have to learn to trust our gut.

I follow The Artist’s Way routine of daily morning pages and try to meditate for a few minutes every morning. Both practices – along with conversations with values-aligned friends who help me navigate my worst and best instincts when I need support thinking through the choice between action and inaction – help me navigate “it depends.”