The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world

With Chapter 4, Comer moves to Part 2 of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, in which he devotes his attention to solutions. As the chapter title indicates, he immediately sets out to debunk the notion behind the common complaint by over-busy people: Namely, that what we really need is more time to get things done.

Most people afflicted by the disease of hurry would not use extra time for deep renewal and rest; they would reflexively fill it with more tasks and projects like the ones that already consume all their time. For most people, having more time would not alleviate the problem, but compound it, because the root problem is not the amount of time we have available but our own disposition toward how we use that time. The solution, Comer writes, is not more time, but rather “to slow down and simplify our lives around what really matters” (62).

Part of the problem behind contemporary society’s obsession with hurry is the unspoken idea that we should be able to do it all. This is false, Comer says. The truth is that we all have limitations of various kinds which prevent us from doing many of those things which we might want to do: limitations relating to our bodies, minds, gifts, personalities, families of origin, socioeconomic status, education, and so on. Rather than bemoan these limitations or pretend they don’t exist, Comer advises his readers to embrace them. There is freedom, he notes, in understanding that we simply can’t do it all. Further, he holds that it is often precisely in our limitations—in the finiteness of our nature and the specificity of our place and time—where we can encounter God’s call on our lives. We can either choose to pretend we have no limitations and an infinite amount of time, and in so doing, waste a great deal of it, or we can embrace the fact that our time and abilities are limited, and so devote those limited resources to the things that really matter in life.

In this section, Comer again notes the two dominant themes of the early portion of the book: The Dangers of a Hurried Lifestyle and The Importance of Living in the Present Moment. He weaves these themes through his conversational style, continuing to make frequent use of quotes and lists of important points, as he did in Part 1. While the theme of the dangers of a hurried lifestyle appears throughout this chapter, Comer is in the process of shifting his focus from those dangers to their solutions, the first of which is to acknowledge certain hard truths about ourselves, such as our finite nature and the limitations that come with it. Essentially, then, one of the dangers of a hurried lifestyle is that we will become blind to the truth about ourselves. This leads Comer once again to underscore the importance of living in the present moment, which one begins to do by embracing one’s limitations. When we accept the hard truths about our limited nature, we can let go of our unhealthy expectations of what we can do with our time, and this frees our experience up to enjoy the present moment in an entirely new way.