Book Description
“How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World”
If You Just Remember One Thing
Hurry is incompatible with love, joy, and peace. Eliminate it with... More
Bullet Point Summary and Quotes
- Living a hurried life leads to emotional, mental, and spiritual burnout, even when achieving outward success.
- Teaching six times each Sunday at a fast-growing megachurch left the author feeling "like a ghost. Half alive, half dead... It's like my soul is hollow," and he realized that "in America you can be a success as a pastor and a failure as an apprentice of Jesus; you can gain a church and lose your soul".
- The author demoted himself to lead a smaller urban church in Portland, took a sabbatical, started therapy, and slowed down to accept Jesus' invitation: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest... For my yoke is easy and my burden is light".
- Hurry is the greatest threat to spiritual life because it severs our connection to God, other people, and our own souls.
- When pastor John Ortberg asked philosopher Dallas Willard how to flourish spiritually, Willard replied, "Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life," echoing Carl Jung's saying, "Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil".
- Love is patient. The author's worst moments of anger happen when rushing his family out the door. Theologian Kosuke Koyama wrote, "God walks 'slowly' because he is love... It is 'slow' yet it is lord over all other speeds...".
- Humanity's relationship to time shifted from natural rhythms to artificial acceleration, longer work hours, and sleep deprivation.
- Before the first public clock tower in Cologne in 1370, life was "dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste...," and before Thomas Edison's light bulb in 1879, people slept eleven hours a night compared to seven today.
- Instead of increasing leisure, labor-saving devices coincided with Americans working nearly four more weeks per year than in 1979.
- The digital age, beginning in 2007, created an attention economy where smartphones and social media are engineered for distraction and addiction.
- Since the iPhone's release in 2007, average users touch their phones 2,617 times daily, attention spans have dropped to eight seconds (less than a goldfish's nine seconds).
- Former Facebook president Sean Parker admitted social media was built around the question: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?...".
- Cardiologist Meyer Friedman defined hurry sickness as "A continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish or achieve more and more things... in less and less time," which manifests in ten symptoms: irritability, hypersensitivity, restlessness, workaholism, emotional numbness, out-of-order priorities, lack of bodily care, escapist behaviors, slippage of spiritual disciplines, and isolation.
- The solution to an overbusy life is not more time, but slowing down, simplifying, and accepting our human limitations.
- Living deliberately requires saying no to constant distractions and redeeming the time wasted on entertainment.
- Henry David Thoreau went to the woods "to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life."
- The average American wastes 705 hours on social media and 2,737.5 hours watching TV annually.
- Although Jesus had a full schedule and faced constant interruptions, He was never in a hurry.
- When Lazarus was dying, "...he stayed where he was two more days...," and on His way to heal Jairus's dying daughter, He stopped to care for an ill woman.
- Just as people read biographies of Steve Jobs or Barack Obama to copy their daily habits, Christians should copy Jesus' lifestyle habits.
- A Microsoft survey found that 77% of young adults reach for their phone whenever nothing occupies their attention.
- Withdrawing to a quiet place for silence and solitude was the source of Jesus' spiritual strength.
- Purposeful solitude is different from escapist isolation. Richard Foster writes, "Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment." Practicing a daily morning quiet time quiets external and internal noise so we can have peace.
- Because infinite human desire cannot be satisfied by finite things, displaced desire creates a chronic restlessness that advertising exploits.
- The Sabbath (Shabbat, meaning "to stop" and "to delight") is a time for rest, worship, and resistance against materialism.
- God rested on the seventh day, blessing it to multiply life. In Exodus 20, "...the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God", making it a day for rest and worship rather than a day off spent running errands.
- Sabbath-keeping Seventh-day Adventists live ten years longer than average Americans.
- Jesus taught that wealth is deceitful and cannot be served alongside God.
- Materialism fails to increase well-being past a middle-class baseline, acts as an engine for hurry, and must be countered by practicing simplicity/minimalism.
- Princeton researchers Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that "...your emotional well-being is as good as it's going to get at $75,000."
- Minimalism is "the intentional promotion of the things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from them."
- Principles of simple living: evaluating the time-cost of purchases, avoiding goods made by exploited workers, never impulse buying, buying fewer and better things, sharing, giving things away, budgeting, enjoying things without owning them, appreciating creation and simple pleasures, calling out advertising propaganda, and leading a cheerful revolt against materialism.
- The spiritual discipline of slowing uses gamification (fun, self-imposed rules) to slow down our bodies and minds so our souls can experience God.
- Slowing is “cultivating patience by deliberately choosing to place ourselves in positions where we simply have to wait”.
- Practicing slowing:
- For travel and waiting, drive at the speed limit, use the slow lane to pray, come to a full stop at stop signs, don't text and drive, arrive ten minutes early without a phone, and pick the longest grocery checkout line.
- For technology and focus, turn your smartphone into a grayscale, distraction-free dumbphone/get a flip phone, put away your phone at 8:30pm and keep it off until after morning quiet time, schedule email and social media time, remove your TV or limit weekly hours, and single-tasking.
- For daily rhythms, walk slower, take a monthly day alone for silence and solitude, journal, practice mindfulness and Scripture meditation, take long vacations (study finds that happiness peaks on day eight of vacation), and cook whole foods to eat in as a family.
- Silence and solitude, Sabbath, simplicity, and slowing are a means to an end: inhabiting the present moment and abiding in God's presence.
- Whenever the author slips into hurry, he repeats his reset mantra: "Slow down. Breathe. Come back to the moment. Receive the good as gift. Accept the hard as a pathway to peace. Abide."
- "The Present is the point at which time touches eternity." - C. S. Lewis's
- John Ortberg observes that when you aim at an easy life/yoke, "Your capacity for tackling hard assignments will actually grow".
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