Do you reflect on your ‘busyness’?

We all have a lot on our plates, all the time. Some times less, sometimes more, but whether you are single or you have a family, you have your responsibilities and jobs you ‘just’ have to do. The problem becomes when your ‘To Do’ list is always full, and you lose touch with Others that mean something to you and as well as with yourself.

Being ‘busy’ can become a habit, by which you escape relationships and any sort of difficulties that require your wholehearted presence. It’s a way to avoid Yourself too – because we grow and develop the most in connection with Others and by facing the pain or going Inside (you know – the only way out, is the way through).

What’s worse, as the writer Omid Safi put it: “We live in a culture that celebrates activity. We collapse our sense of who we are into what we do for a living. The public performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us as tired, exhausted, over-stretched, the more they think we must be somehow … indispensable. That we matter.”

Another symptom of our society is that we go to bed too late, and we wake up exhausted. We continuously think we need to do more, and many feel guilty of their subjective underperformance. How did we end up in this rabbit hole?

Next time, when I’ll say to the Other or myself, that I’m busy, I’ll stop and take a deep breath to reflect why I feel so and what’s driving me. Especially if there’s a child, asking me to play in the middle of the storm of busyness as just five-minute-long total presence might completely change the day.