Why I have begun treating peace as a refusal of unnecessary urgency

Recently, I noticed a shift in how I think about peace.

I have started to treat peace not as something I will earn once life slows down, but as something I can sometimes choose in the middle of everything.

Not peace as in giving up. Not peace as in checking out. But peace as a deliberate refusal to be swept along by the urgency that modern life keeps pumping into every hour of the day.

I started recognising this shift in myself over the past few years. Back in Melbourne, a city that moves fast and rewards ambition, it had been easy to get caught in the current — packed schedules, constant notifications and the sense that stillness was a luxury. I began questioning whether the urgency was real or simply inherited.

I did not reach that conclusion quickly. What I keep returning to is simple: some urgency is real, while some is a story I have inherited and can question.

What “modern urgency” actually is

Before we can refuse something, it helps to name it clearly.

Modern urgency isn’t the same as genuine busyness. Genuine busyness is real: deadlines, responsibilities, people who need things from you. That exists. What I mean by urgency is something different. It’s the ambient feeling that you should always be doing more, moving faster, optimizing harder, and that any moment of stillness is a moment wasted.

It shows up as the compulsion to check your phone before your feet touch the floor. The guilt of sitting with a coffee without also listening to a podcast. The low-level panic that follows a slow afternoon. The sense that rest has to be earned and that peace is a reward, not a right.

In my own life, some urgency comes from actual circumstances; the rest grows louder through notifications, work expectations and the endless pressure to improve.

Peace, in this context, isn’t passive. Choosing it is an act of mild rebellion.

The Buddhist framing that actually helps

Buddhism has a concept that maps onto this surprisingly well: papañca. It roughly translates as mental proliferation, the mind’s tendency to take a single moment and spin it into an elaborate story about the past, the future, what it means, what you should do, what might go wrong.

The urgency many of us feel day to day can be papañca in overdrive. Sometimes the present contains a real problem; at other times, much of the pressure comes from the stories layered on top of it.

Buddhist practice doesn’t ask you to eliminate thought. It asks you to notice when you’re doing it and to return, gently, to what’s actually here. That noticing, over and over, is the practice. And it turns out to be deeply subversive in a culture that profits from your distraction.

The Eightfold Path, which I’ve written about before, offers a framework for ethical and attentive living that isn’t religious so much as it’s practical. Right intention, right effort, right mindfulness. These aren’t commandments. They’re prompts for asking: am I reacting automatically, or am I actually choosing this?

Why this question feels timely to me

The question that keeps returning in my own life is this: which forms of urgency are necessary, and which have simply become habitual?

After years of measuring life by output and optimisation, I started questioning the premise rather than merely adjusting the schedule.

A large multi-site randomized study published in Nature Human Behaviour found small short-term reductions in self-reported stress after four brief mindfulness exercises compared with an active control. The 2,239 participants were mostly students, all fluent in English, and recruited in higher-income countries, so the result should not be described as evidence across broadly diverse populations or as proof of lasting effects.

That matters because the barrier to entry can be low. You do not need a cushion, a teacher or a particular belief system. For people who can make the space, even a brief pause can be enough to begin.

What this refusal actually looks like in practice

Here’s where I want to push back against the version of this idea that gets softened into something decorative.

Choosing peace doesn’t look like scented candles and slow mornings (though neither of those is a problem). In most lives, it looks like friction. It looks like not responding to the message immediately, when everything in you wants to clear the notification. It looks like sitting with the discomfort of an unfinished to-do list rather than pushing through exhaustion to finish it. It looks like letting a conversation end without having the last word.

I run most mornings, partly for fitness and partly because chosen physical discomfort helps me practise staying present. It will not work that way for everyone, but for me it is a useful practice.

That’s what conscious refusal of urgency feels like from the inside. Not the absence of pressure, but a different relationship with it.

The counterargument: isn’t this just privilege?

It’s worth sitting with the pushback here, because it’s not wrong.

There are people for whom urgency isn’t a story but a reality. Financial pressure, caregiving responsibilities, unstable work, health crises. The idea of “choosing peace” can sound tone-deaf when you’re genuinely fighting to keep things together.

I spent time in my mid-20s in a warehouse job feeling lost and hollowed out, not because I was in a crisis of survival, but because I was in a crisis of meaning. I know the difference matters. And I know that not everyone has access to the same conditions for stillness.

What I have learned is that a little more peace often begins with something small, such as drinking a coffee without rushing. Even those moments are shaped by money, work, care duties and health, so the point is not to pretend that everyone has equal access to unhurried time.

A brief pause will not solve structural pressures, but it can still create a little room inside many ordinary days.

A framework for building the refusal into ordinary days

Rather than a list of tips, I want to offer something closer to a sequence, a progression of small choices that compound over time.

The first move is noticing. Not changing anything yet, just starting to see how often you’re in reactive mode: rushing between tasks before one is finished, scrolling while waiting for anything, filling silence because silence feels like a problem to solve. Just noticing.

The second move is inserting friction. Deliberately slowing one thing per day. Making your morning coffee without looking at your phone. Walking somewhere without headphones. These aren’t grand gestures. They’re small proofs that you can exist without stimulation and nothing bad happens.

The third move is building a “peace anchor.” One fixed point in the day that belongs to presence. A five-minute sit. A walk. Drinking something slowly. It doesn’t need to be long. What matters is that it’s consistent and that you actually mean it while it’s happening.

The fourth move is the hardest: learning to be with incompleteness. Most urgency, if you trace it back, is a low-level intolerance of things being unresolved. Unread emails, unanswered questions, unfinished projects. Peace doesn’t require everything to be done. It requires being okay with what isn’t.