Lunch Box Notes

LUNCH BOX NOTE: Not everything urgent is important — especially the things that demand you abandon yourself.

There’s a kind of urgency in the world now that hums underneath everything.
It’s in the emails that arrive before sunrise, the notifications that buzz while you’re trying to breathe, the invisible pressure to respond, react, fix, perform — instantly. It’s the cultural current that tells you that your value is directly connected to your speed, your availability, your usefulness.

But urgency has a cost, and the first thing it asks you to sacrifice is yourself.

For years, maybe you didn’t even notice you were doing it. You said yes because you didn’t want to disappoint anyone. You pushed through because you didn’t want to be “that person” who couldn’t cope. You responded immediately because you thought people would think poorly of you if you didn’t.

But here is a truth that sounds simple and lands like a stone dropped into deep water:

Not everything urgent is important — especially the things that demand you abandon yourself.

And many of the urgent things in your life right now are precisely that — demands that ask you to override your body, your boundaries, your energy, your knowing.

The poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote,

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.”

But self-preservation is wildly countercultural in a world that praises self-erasure as virtue.

You were taught — by family, by church, by culture — that love means dropping everything.
Answering immediately.
Fixing what isn’t yours.
Carrying more than your share.
Reading between the lines and anticipating needs before they’re spoken.

But that wasn’t love.
That was training.

Training for martyrdom.
Training for exhaustion.
Training for disappearing yourself in the name of being “good.”

And now, as an adult, when your body tries to tell you it’s too much — with headaches, tight shoulders, short breaths, foggy thinking — you still override it. Because urgency has become familiar. Almost comforting. A way of proving you’re still holding everything together.

But here’s the thing about the nervous system: it never lies.

When people or systems demand urgency, your body knows when it’s being pushed past its edges. It recognises when urgency is masking manipulation. It senses when someone else’s lack of planning or emotional regulation is being handed to you as an obligation.

Your body whispers what the culture tries to silence — slow down, check in, choose wisely.

David Whyte once wrote about “the fierce discipline of listening.”
Listening not to the loudest voice, but to the truest one.
And for many of us, the truest voice is the quietest — the one that lives under the noise, under the pressure, under the expectations.

That voice is the one that asks:
Does this actually matter?
Is this truly mine to carry?
At what cost to myself?

Because here’s another truth: urgency that costs you your self-respect is not important.
Urgency that fragments your inner world is not important.
Urgency that requires you to betray your own needs is not important.

It might be urgent to someone else, but it doesn’t become yours simply because they’re loud about it.

And all those years you spent rushing to fix things that weren’t yours? That wasn’t love.
That was fear.
Fear of being seen as unreliable.
Fear of disappointing someone.
Fear of losing your place, your belonging, your worth.

But you don’t owe anyone your self-abandonment.

You don’t owe immediate answers.
You don’t owe emotional labour you don’t have.
You don’t owe your body’s bandwidth to someone else’s chaos.

You can care deeply and still hold boundaries.
You can be compassionate and still say, “I’ll respond when I have capacity.”
You can love people and still refuse to be available every second.

The mystic Fr. Richard Rohr says,

“The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”

If you respond to everything as if it’s urgent, soon your whole life will start to feel like a crisis.
But if you begin to honour what’s truly important — your wellbeing, your truth, your internal peace — the unnecessary urgency will start to lose its grip.

So today’s love note is a gentle, holy permission:

You are allowed to pause before responding.
You are allowed to take a breath.
You are allowed to wait until your body says, ‘yes, I can hold this.’

Not everything urgent is important.
Especially not the things that ask you to abandon yourself.

And the more you practise this, the more your life will begin to rearrange itself around what actually matters — presence, honesty, slowness, care.

NOTE TO SELF: I refuse to abandon myself in the name of urgency. I move at the speed of what’s true, not the speed of other people’s panic.

Liz ox