Crises proliferate. Not just as labels but as the actual state of affairs, of impasse, ruination, and break-down. As an anthropologist working on Syria with extensive fieldwork inside the country before the uprising of 2011 and later with ongoing fieldwork in Lebanon, Jordan and with exiled Syrians in Europe, I find it safe to say the crisis is polyvalent. The crisis is slow and urgent as it moves with Syrians in time and across locations. This piece argues that urgent engagement with slow forms of crisis and slow engagement with the calls to urgency is needed. This calls for an exercise in discernment, which takes urgency and claims it as a diagnostic for ethnographic exploration.