The Insatiable Addiction to Urgency

I'm flying home from three full days in Seattle for the NAIS Annual Conference. This year, I attended the Heads Summit for the first time — a full day of programming designed specifically for sitting heads of schools. I sat with two women I've met along the way in schools and a handful of other men and women I met over breakfast. Over the next six or seven hours, we heard from Dr. Paula Chu and Heather McGowan, and boy do they have me thinking.

I have been fortunate to attend conferences since early in my career. Starting in boarding school admissions meant I was on the road a lot and had the opportunity to engage in conference work early — so I grew an early appreciation for the learning, but also the camaraderie. As a head, these conferences sometimes feel both indulgent and necessary, and I oscillate between the two. But I left the Heads Summit rolling some things around in my brain over and over in the following two days of conference work. And as I sit on this plane flying back to the east coast, I am struck by how much I needed to hear what I heard — not only for my school, but for myself.

One of the first phrases in Dr. Chu's keynote was that we are suffering from an "insatiable addiction to urgency."

Not me, was my immediate thought. I love a long, unwinding game of Mahjong with girlfriends on a Wednesday night. I've recently taken up printmaking in my "spare" time. And yet, the longer I sat with it, the harder it became to hold that story. I order Amazon overnight. We DoorDash. And just last week, I got pulled over for running a red light — for the first time since I was sixteen. I was mortified. And yet there I was, thinking: no, that's not me.

The reality is that we live in a world that mistakes speed for progress. That treats discomfort as a problem to be solved rather than a signal to be read. That reaches for resolution before the struggle has had a chance to teach us anything. And those of us who lead schools — who care deeply, who feel the weight of every student and every teacher and every decision — we are perhaps the most susceptible to it. We see something that isn't working and we want to fix it. Now. Fast. Completely.

Dr. Chu also shared an idea from developmental psychology — the concept of moratorium. The in-between space where identity is being formed, where the old way of being has been released and the new one hasn't arrived yet. The research is clear: you cannot avoid or shortcut this. You have to go through the crisis. And in going through it, you have to give something up. And in that giving up, there is grief.

I've written about grief before — about the unexpected ways it shows up. And I think it's here too. Productive friction is critical to learning. And in that friction, there is grief.

Our second keynote, Heather McGowan, reminded us that we are preparing kids for a world we cannot fully see or imagine, using frameworks that were built for a world that no longer quite exists. And yet — in our own moratorium of work — have we grieved? Have we let it go?

Or are we just feeding the insatiable addiction to urgency? We will fix it now. Do more, move faster. Maybe we can get there.

I came home from the conference full of ideas and also full of questions. About my school, my team, my own pace. About the gap between the vision I carry and the reality I'm living inside of. About what it means to lead a place I love, in a moment that asks more of all of us than any of us quite expected.

I see the vision. I believe in it. I am running toward it with everything I have.

But I've been asking myself, somewhere quiet, a question I don't quite have the answer to yet.

What am I losing along the way?