Thursday, August 5, 2010

Things take time.

There's an affliction we are living with. It's called immediacy. It's the idea that if things take time it's because someone isn't working hard enough, someone is incompetent.

This obsession with immediacy will destroy us.

I am listening now to a report on the Gulf Oil Disaster. Now all the nabobs are saying the consequences of the cataclysm are relatively minor. That the oil has almost immediately and almost magically disappeared.

We are speeding up this disaster so the news can move onto something else. Something else that will capture our hyperbole for a week or two. Someone's racist tirade. Enhanced ass or drunken spree.

The fact is that the effects of the oil disaster will take years to recover from. And no one knows how deeply oil has seeped into our food chain. No one knows the true effects.

However, we must move on. We've given it enough time.

We do the same, of course, with the work we create. We allow it to be as disposable as wax paper. We don't give it time to build. We pretend the effects of a campaign will be
seen in three weeks. We expect work to be ready in three weeks.

In a previous post I named our era "The Quickies." The era in which everything is instantaneous. From muscles (steroids) to love (eharmony) to fame (reality shows.) In America there is a sizable portion of the population who believe that creation happened not over billions of years but over dozens of hours.

They want things now.

But things take time.
They don't work on your schedule.
They need to be pushed, pulled, explored.
Quick fixes don't fix anything.
Time.

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