What’s the difference between reacting and responding?

 

Another excerpt from Hearty Masculinity:

You aren’t a blank slate, you don’t come to your decisions without a history, much of which you had no control over. For that matter, you don’t “come at” or attack time hoping to subdue it, but instead you are in time, part of it. As such, we will always, in an ultimate sense, be reacting to time. Yet, as David Allen, efficiency guru extraordinaire, says, “Reacting is automatic, but thinking is not.”[1] Or, to frame it all another way, its good to respond instead of react.

Reacting is shooting from the hip (which is a good way to blow off your feet), doubling down on your hot take and first impulse. Responding is slowing down, taking a pause and a beat. Do you know where the word respond comes from, it’s etymology? To pledge again! Just as we pledge allegiance to a flag, when we respond instead of reacting, we are acting out of our faithful prior commitments, out of our allegiances and loyalties, our better and more thoughtful selves.

Responding is taking the time with those glasses of yours, to see more clearly, to pay attention. Have you heard of theSelective Attention Test? It is sometimes called the “gorilla experiment.” A psychologist named Daniel Simons would show a video of people throwing a basketball and ask the viewer to count how many times the ball was thrown. What he didn’t tell them was that a person in a gorilla suit was going to dance through the frame, and because people were too busy keeping their eyes on the ball, they didn’t even notice the gorilla in the room.[3] To quote Burkeman again, “What you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is… At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.”[4]

You hear the lump of paradoxes and tensions there, right? I am asking you to pay thoughtful attention to your deepest most meaningful allegiances and self—while also acknowledging that what you pay attention to is a sort of pledge, it will determine your future loyalties and become your future self. Additionally, you’re somewhat violently tossed into all of this, yet I’m asking you to keep calm and carry on. No wonder we’re simultaneously fallen angels and anxious apes!

---

[1] Allen, Getting Things Done: the art of stress-free productivity, page 16.

[3] Beck, Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age, page 4.

[4] Burkeman: 4,000, page 91.