
Haste
Haste
You want to rush, get to the end
work it out and have it solved.
Who wouldn’t? But the cost,
who pays the price of all this haste?
A friend of mine knew Mirabehn
Gandhi’s English companion.
Her story; when the Mahatma
found himself without a pencil
she tore off to find it, returning
breathless with the prize and
was rewarded with the words:
‘Mirabehn all haste is violence’.
Carl Jung was fond of this adage,
‘all haste is of the devil’,
he would sit and pause after
every sentence of his writing.
Those gaps, informed his genius,
as he mapped our psychic topography,
escaping the diabolical lie that
time is always running away.
Even the Roman Emperor, Augustus,
deploring rashness, for a logo had
a crab and a butterfly with the motto;
Festina Lente—make haste slowly.
Later the Tuscan Medici’s Tortoise
with a sail on its back reminded them
of those vineyards slowly maturing
followed by a measured harvest
yielding their waiting’s ripeness.
How much pain could we
save ourselves by recalling
every journey ends in rest:
death’s sacramental comma,
why hurry towards it when there is
such bounty in the lives of those we rush past?
So much truth for us in the eyes of those
we try and fix with unseemly haste.
So much ripeness unharvested
when we gather in to soon.
So much to be gained when
we make haste slowly.
Poem Copyright – From ‘Arriving in Magic’ 2013
For copies go to www.adriangrscott.com
Photo Edinburgh August 2014