publishing an ode to urgency from earlier this year:

I write with a sense of urgency now. I write as if my time is limited as if the words I write might disappear at any moment, as if the ideas that shoot across my mind, burning like a meteor entering the atmosphere, have a limited window for capturing before they are lost forever to the ether. I write with a hunger because every second that goes by is another second where insight could inspire a spawn of branches, where expression could embody the essence of a lost feeling, where impact could be the difference between one second living life the fullest and one second living life disappointed. Urgency is important because it imbues energy. It blesses artifacts from a deep untapped pool of creative fire. It’s as if you can hear the urgency in the words, the panting of heavy breath, the rush of a powerful, escaping gust, the flare of a fire given breath. And then there’s the vacuum. The absence of the sound, of the energy, of the feeling. You have to finish before the weight of emptiness settles in, before it creeps into every available hole and clogs up the pores of expression. It’s a race against time, a race against entropy. You, one body of a collection of little bodies scaling the infinite mountain of the incomprehensible network that is life. Flitting from one beauty to the next, the incredibly joy from a limited life, from a limited time, the burst of brightness from a butterfly’s timeline.

I pray I always feel urgent. Urgent to preserve the burst of energy, to capture its essence in a flurry of writing and making and creating for future refinement. A burst fire of clicks to capture on film what the feeling points to.


This is the 76th installment in my experiment of publishing raw, lightly edited mini-essays every day towards achieving 100 public pieces. Check out the rationale and the full list here.