The escalator and the afternoon

An original commentary about the habit of rushing.

At the shopping centre, I found myself irritated by an escalator which was carrying me exactly where I wanted to go. It was simply failing to do so at the speed my impatience had invented for it.

I had no appointment. Nobody was waiting beside the next floor with a stopwatch. Yet the person ahead of me seemed to be using an unreasonable amount of afternoon by standing still. My destination had become less important than the offence of not reaching it already.

This is a difficult attitude to defend once written down. In the moment, it feels wonderfully well supplied with reasons. There is another task after this one, a journey after the task and something else I may have forgotten. The day becomes a line of doors, each worth opening mainly because another waits behind it.

I do not wish to turn every necessary hurry into a moral failure. Missing a train is not improved by an elegant thought about patience. But I would like to recognise the afternoons when the emergency has been supplied entirely by me.

At the top, I stood aside and looked at the shop I had come to visit. For a few seconds, arriving was allowed to mean something more than permission to begin the next departure.

Examine the methods the writer uses to question unnecessary hurry.