Comer opens Chapter 1 by recounting a conversation between two mentor figures in his life, John Ortberg and Dallas Willard. Ortberg asks Willard, “What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?” to which Willard replies, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life” (18-19). This quote, which is the inspiration for the book’s title, leads Comer to an examination of the social and spiritual issues that the problem of hurry causes in contemporary society. He notes that most people, when asked how they are doing, will reply that they are doing well, but are busy. 

“Busyness” has become such an inextricable part of modern life that many people don’t even notice how much of a hold it has on their lives. This is true across most subsets of Western populations, including Christians (and especially, Comer notes, among pastors). However, there is a troubling problem there, because most of the highest values which Christians hold to—love, joy, peace, and so on—are all virtues that require deep attention to the present moment; they cannot be rushed. So if busyness and haste are among the defining attributes of modern culture, then it is a culture that will likely fail to produce the love, joy, and peace that are meant to be hallmarks of the Christian way of living. As Comer contends:

The message is clear [in our culture]: slow is bad, fast is good. But in the upside-down kingdom, our value system is turned on its head: hurry is of the devil, slow is of Jesus, because Jesus is what love looks like in flesh and blood. The same is true for joy and peace. (24) 

While some busyness is unavoidable in modern life, Comer insists that the way that the spirit of busyness has pervaded everything in our lives is a sign of its toxic effects. If busyness gives way to the disease of hurry, in which we are perpetually pulled to give our attention to the next task, the next new thing ahead of us, then we will find ourselves unable to live out the deepest principles of the kingdom of God.

Chapter 1 enjoins readers to Avoid the Trap of a Hurried Lifestyle. The first danger Comer points out is that hurry will make us unable to live in accordance with our own deepest values. Most of the things we say we prioritize in life—relationships, family, faith, and so on—are things that take significant time and deep attention, but a mindset of perpetual hurry leaves no room for such things. As such, life becomes an endless and exhausting parade of trivial things: the passing tasks that seem important in the moment but soon fade to insignificance in retrospect. This chapter also urges people to Live in the Present Moment. Comer lists the virtues of love, joy, and peace as necessary aspects of a life with God, but ones which only grow and bear fruit if we can slow down, stop living in the future, and give them the attention they deserve: “If there’s a secret to happiness, it’s simple—presence to the moment. The more present we are to the now, the more joy we tap into” (24).

Chapter Lessons:

• “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life” in order to become a better version of yourself.
• “Busyness” is an intrinsic part of modern life, particularly in Western cultures.
• Endlessly hurrying through life prevents people from focusing on deeper spiritual goals.
• Only by consciously living in the present moment can people find true happiness.

Reflection Questions:

• When you imagine becoming the best version of yourself, what attributes would you have? 
• In your own past experience, how has the modern preoccupation with “busyness” created a “toxic” environment or an unpleasant moment for you or others?

Comer offers a historical retrospective on the events that led to our culture’s current preoccupation with a hurried pace of life, going all the way back to the invention of the sundial in the ancient world. The ability to measure time led to continued progress in mechanizing that measurement and making use of those measurements, from the development of accurate clock technology in the Middle Ages to the creation of rigorous daily schedules in the Christian monastic tradition. Even by the time the early modern era came about, however, humans largely continued to keep a natural and moderate pace of life, to the point of regularly sleeping up to 11 hours a night. This began to change with the industrialization of society, and the changes accelerated through the 20th century. Whereas the expectation of most people in the mid-20th century was that increasing technological advancements would lead to more leisure time, the truth is that leisure time has consistently gone down across recent decades. 

With the advent of the 21st century and the nearly simultaneous emergence of social media and smartphones, all of these changes moved into an even higher gear: “All of this reached a climax in 2007. When the history books are written, they will point to ’07 as an inflection point on par with [the invention of the printing press in] 1440” (35). After 2007, people not only found their schedules jammed with more tasks, but began to discover that whatever leisure time they might have was almost entirely consumed by the new media technologies in their pockets. “To summarize,” Comer writes, “after millennia of slow, gradual acceleration, in recent decades the sheer velocity of our culture has reached an exponential fever pitch” (43). 

While Comer does not provide an in-depth exposition of how to Avoid the Trap of a Hurried Lifestyle here, he assumes hurry to be dangerous for the reasons he laid out in Chapter 1, and he provides his analysis as an explanation for how modern society created such a spiritually perilous situation. Similarly, his focus on how best to Live in the Present Moment is understated in this chapter, but its contours are already clearly visible in his treatment of the attention-corroding aspects of smartphone technology and social media. Comer notes that the average human attention span has dropped to eight seconds since the year 2000, less than the estimated attention span of a goldfish. Such a situation, he implies, is simply not conducive to being aware of our surroundings and invested in our most important relationships. 

Chapter Lessons:

• The steadily accelerating pace of human life can be traced to society’s progressively more accurate methods of measuring time. 
• Industrialization dramatically accelerated this trend, leading to less and less leisure time.
• With the advent of the smartphone in 2007, society’s focus on “busyness” and marking time reached a new level of intensity as even people’s leisure time became governed by technology.
• Human attention has suffered greatly in the wake of people’s wholesale embrace of smartphone technology and social media.

Reflection Questions:

• If you were to eliminate all clocks, smartphones, and other time-measuring devices from your environment for a single day, how would these changes affect your outlook?
• How much “screen time” do you log each day, and how does the omnipresence of technology affect your overall mood and mental health?