An old adage we are all familiar with goes: “Haste makes waste!” Often, popular sayings carry wisdom that seems obvious and is therefore blatantly dismissed as trivial by some well-read intellectuals who, at best, are nothing more than warehouses of miscellaneous facts.
We live in a society that has elevated haste, or speed, to a sort of totem. This idea of haste in a near-sacred status, which first emerged with the Futurists of the early twentieth century, has ironically and tragically returned as the dominant theme among the ruling classes in this new millennium.
Therefore, we are urged to hurry because there’s no time, because time is seen as a tyrant, driving us into an unrealistic and uncontainable acceleration of life.
But who is truly running out of time? It is those old powers of the world that are facing shifts in human consciousness, feeling trapped and, as a result, speeding up their actions. Yes, they are the ones accelerating as they feel their breath shortening and mistakenly believe that by speeding up, they can somehow slow down their inevitable decline.
It’s a staggering paradox: the powers of the world believe they can slow their descent by accelerating. They hasten, convinced that by doing so they will sidestep reflection, creating a vortex where – they hope- no one can pause and think. However, this is all false – because, in truth, the other side of haste is hypocrisy.
They would have us believe that rushing prevents stagnation and that problems must be solved quickly, hypocritically ignoring that what we are experiencing today is the result of a long historical trajectory in which those in power -no surprise – have never rushed at all. Their true intention, hidden behind the facade of urgency, is to delay the eruption of contradictions for as long as possible, so to stall epochal anthropological changes which however —and thank God— do not depend on the petty will of deranged superegos.
The hypocrisy behind haste lies in the unwillingness to recognize that change occurs over long and slow periods of time, almost imperceptibly. This process is well explained by an example that Marco often gives about the ripening of fruit. Day by day it grows and evolves so subtly that we hardly notice it, and then, one fine morning, it is suddenly ripe.
It seems almost sudden to us when, in fact, months -not just a few days- have passed.
What shall we say then? That the fruit ripens quickly, or that it has taken a long time to ripen? The hypocrite would claim it all happened very quickly. This reveals that haste and hypocrisy are two sides of the same coin. On the other hand, we must not rush; we should practise meditation, which is the exact opposite of haste. We choose to pause, sit, and reclaim the space that haste has denied us. We learn, slowly, that it takes time and silence to listen and observe, for thought requires gestation and contemplation.
We want to be still – firmly planted, strong and immovable – with an unshakable determination not to succumb and not to rush headlong into the current… in haste.