Stop the Glorification of Busy

We live in a world that wears “busy” as a badge of honor. 

Often when we ask friends how they are doing, their response is “Oh, work, work, work.” And that work is usually doing something they hate. 

I am not trying to say that doing things is wrong and that we should just be sitting around all day doing nothing. But we have allowed our busyness to become a distraction from life. We are missing everything. In times where we are not going from one distraction to another, we are thinking about another distraction, thinking about what we think we should be doing, or being worried that we are forgetting something that we should be doing. 

There is no being “here”. There is no presence. There is rarely a time when in this busyness we are actually experiencing that which we are doing. We’re thinking about the past or the future. 

All of this doing creates so much turbulence in our outer, physical world as well as our mental world. There is no space. No stillness. No time to experience our expansiveness, no time for awe. We’re throwing our lives away into the future for experiences we never experience because we are never here. 

I don’t think that any other creature in nature does this. You don’t see cats, dogs, or deer rushing around blindly, creating distraction after distraction to get to somewhere they don’t want to go. You’ll see them do something when they need to, they get up when they are hungry, scratch when they have an itch, but they’re “here”. They’re present. They’re living life now. 

I’ve made a list of six ways in which we can cut down on this societal psychosis:

  1. Meditate: experience silence and stillness and introduce a sense of expansiveness into your inner world. There are hundreds of techniques. Try one that resonates with you. 
  2. Journal: journaling can be a very powerful spiritual tool that allows us to become more self aware. Find out what is really important to you in life and live for that. 
  3. Say “no”: it’s okay to say “NO” to people, appointments, and things. Honor you. Don’t say yes to everything that comes your way.
  4. Limit time on social media: this can be a big distractor. Social media itself is neither positive or negative. But too often we become engrossed in it. 
  5. Opt-out: opt out of all that inbox clutter! If you’re getting emails from organizations and companies that you are not interested in and don’t read, unsubscribe from their email list and keep the ones you find truly beneficial. 
  6. Spend time in nature: experience the awe of nature. Allow yourself to just “be” in it. It is grounding and soothing and can put you in touch with what really matters while disconnecting your from pointless distraction and noise. 
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Silence and Interconnectedness

I think that our incessant desire for distraction causes us to forget our beautiful and sublime interconnectedness, we forget ourselves, our inner essence. We lose touch with our equanimity and the world as a whole. Our realty becomes anxious and contracted. Ignorance and greed (for money, attention, power, etc.) are born from a power struggle of gaining some kind of importance, retaining it, and fear of its loss. We become blinded to reality and immersed in the illusion of separation. We come to fear silence, stillness, and thereby our true, inner selves as we liken them to dissolution. However, this is where comfort and liberation truly lie. Not in the frenetic, hectic, crazy world “out there”. We are not our incomes, Facebook likes, relationship statuses, or the cars we drive. Evaluation of actions, thoughts, fear, inquiry into the self and the oceans of our consciousness will uncover this stillness and open us to our intimate interconnectedness with everything. We can not exist apart from ourselves or anything in the universe and that often engenders a sense of fear, an ego-based fear that is anxious over loss of power and identity, neither of which truly exist. Once this fear is met closely, eye to eye, it disappears and opens us up to the ground of being. It is beautiful. 

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Life Isn’t Something to Be Fixed

We have this very deep, salient, unexamined belief that something is wrong. And if it’s not wrong right now, it’s about to be wrong. There’s a sense that this life is a problem to be solved. Our view is that life is imperfect, a faulty piece of machinery to be glued and pieced together. Something is off and we keep tinkering and trying figure out what’s going wrong and attempting to control things. What happens is the more we tinker, glue, figure, and try to fix and manage things, what we are actually doing is deepening our trance, our unconsciousness, deepening our sense that we are a self that must continuously strive for the unattainable and fix what isn’t there to be fixed.

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