“Again and again,” writes Hannah Proctor,

I kept coming to the same conclusion, which provides no consolation at all: psychological experiences require patience while so much in the world demands urgency.

Proctor, Burnout, page 205

Proctor calls this quality “patient urgency,” and returns to it throughout her work on burnout—a work that retrieves burnout from the skincare industrial complex and brings it back to a dialogue about how our efforts to change the world are so often, and so cruelly, defeated. She is admirably unwilling to define the phrase in tactical terms, calling it only,

a sense of urgency for social transformation that can tolerate difficulties, differences, delay, objective gaps, and interpersonal strains.

Proctor, Burnout, page 156

Importantly, this does not mean simply waiting about for social transformation—that old refrain that progress will happen in time, as if time was an ally working on our behalf. The urgency is in the present moment to act, even as we know those actions will need time to bear fruit, even when it’s unclear how or if they may do so. As I’ve sat with the idea, I’ve thought more and more of planting a tree: you need to plant it at the right time and in the right place, make sure it has enough water and light and compost, protect it from pests and people, but you must wait years for the first peach. Nothing will hurry it along.

And really, you ought to plant a whole grove, or scatter seeds about wherever you can, without ever knowing which ones will be trampled or lost to drought or wind, and which ones will, against the odds, grow tall and strong and true. To have patient urgency is, I think, to know that you must plant those seeds, that you must prepare the soil, that these things cannot wait. That the future we hope for waits upon us, today.