Why it pays to be late (sometimes)

Thomas L Friedman

Sunday 27 November 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/27/why-it-pays-to-be-late-sometimes

It is no surprise so many people feel fearful or unmoored these days. The three largest forces on the planet – technology, globalisation and climate change – are all accelerating at once. As a result, many aspects of our societies, workplaces and geopolitics are being reshaped and need to be reimagined.

When there is a shift in the pace of change in so many realms at once, as we’re now experiencing, it is easy to get overwhelmed by it all.

In such a time, opting to pause and reflect, rather than panic or withdraw, is a necessity. It is not a luxury or a distraction – it is a way to increase the odds that you’ll better understand, and engage productively with, the world around you.

“When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,” argues author Dov Seidman. “You start to reflect; you start to rethink your assumptions, to reimagine what is possible, and reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs.”

My own personal declaration of independence from the whirlwind was sometime last year. I regularly meet friends and interview officials, analysts or diplomats over breakfast: it’s my way of packing more learning into a day and not wasting breakfast by eating alone. Once in a while, though, with traffic and transport, my breakfast guests would arrive 10, 15, or even 20 minutes late. They would invariably arrive flustered, spilling out apologies as they sat down: “My alarm failed…” “My kid was sick…”

On one of those occasions, I realised I didn’t care at all about my guest’s tardiness, so I said: “No, no, please – don’t apologise. In fact, you know what, thank you for being late.”

Because they were late, I explained, I had minted time for myself. I had found a few minutes to just sit and think. I was having fun eavesdropping on the couple at the next table, and people-watching. And, most important, in the pause, I had connected a couple of ideas I had been struggling with for days. So no apology was necessary. Hence: “Thank you for being late.”

I noticed that it felt good to have those few moments of unplanned for, unscheduled time, and it wasn’t just me who felt better. Like many others, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed and exhausted by the dizzying pace of change. I needed to give myself (and my guests) permission to slow down; I needed permission to be alone with my thoughts – without having to tweet about them, take a picture of them, or share them with anyone.

In his sobering book Sabbath, Wayne Muller observes how often people say to him, “I am so busy.” “We say this to one another with no small degree of pride,” Muller writes, “as if our exhaustion were a trophy… To be unavailable to our friends and family, to whiz through our obligations without time for a single, mindful breath, this has become a model of a successful life.”

As the writer Leon Wieseltier explains: technologists want us to think that patience and pausing became virtues only because in the past “we had no choice” – we had to wait longer for things. “And so now that we have made waiting technologically obsolete,” added Wieseltier, “their attitude is: who needs patience any more? But the ancients believed that patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.” Which is why I’d rather learn to pause.

Thank You for Being Late: an Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Acceleration by Thomas L Friedman is published by Allen Lane at £25. To order a copy for £20, go to

bookshop.theguardian.com