We live under the invisible yet relentless yoke of a modern-day overseer: the stopwatch. In our hyperconnected society, time is no longer seen as Creation’s free gift to be cultivated and sanctified, but as a scarce resource to be squeezed dry. Every unoptimized minute is experienced as a loss; every pause, as an act of laziness; every breath, as a silent guilt. We have transformed speed into a moral virtue and efficiency into the new golden calf. However, this constant frenzy conceals a deadly trap for the spirit: the dictatorship of haste.

Faced with this utilitarian juggernaut, authentic spiritual tradition and Christian humanism remind us of a truth as luminous as it is forgotten: love knows no urgency. As Pope Francis so aptly pointed out in his encyclical Laudato si’ , “time is greater than space,” and trying to control and accelerate everything destroys the basic conditions of human life. Real love—the kind that reflects the way God sees us—requires generosity, pauses, and above all, slow, unhurried time. There is no true encounter if the mind is on the next task; there is no fruitful listening if the eyes keep drifting to the mobile phone screen; there is no welcoming of our neighbor when the heart races at an impossible pace.

Haste, in its most intimate essence, is the great enemy of attention and love. When everything is urgent, the other person ceases to be a sacred being to be contemplated and becomes an obstacle to our productivity. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux already warned his contemporaries against the “disordered occupation” that dissipates the soul and dries up affection. Haste makes us blind to the everyday, deaf to the silent suffering of our loved ones, and incapable of perceiving the presence of the eternal in the small things.

Therefore, rediscovering the value of being late to some things—understood not as irresponsibility, but as a wise and deliberate resistance to the tyranny of the clock—is an act of spiritual health. It means choosing the better part, like Mary of Bethany at the feet of the Master, in contrast to Martha’s sterile activism. It means daring to disobey the siren calls of endless productivity in order to dedicate time to wonder, silence, and open-mindedness.

Accepting that we cannot and should not achieve everything is, in reality, the first step toward achieving what truly matters. Because the human soul is not nourished by the speed with which we cross the finish line, but by the depth with which we know how to pause along the way.