I have always tried to stay busy. I have “around the house” projects, charitable projects, artistic projects and fun projects going on almost constantly. If I am home for awhile, I try to have a list of things to get accomplished during that time. I stay busy!
Since the first of the year, I have tried to lay low. I have many upcoming projects, but I have felt the need to take a breath before all of those things begin. This month seemed a good time to get the house in order and get my mind clear.
I can remember my father as I was growing up always being busy. He had a very demanding, important job and a schedule that never wavered. If we had a need to add to the schedule it was always met with the “I’m too busy” excuse. (That was not to say he never added to the schedule, it just means we better not.) If I needed to talk or needed advice, I usually heard “I’m too busy.”
Because of that, as an adult I made a conscious effort to never say, “I am too busy.” I would sit and listen to people for as long as necessary, so that I never uttered those words. And yet I can remember my mother saying that she knew I was “so busy” whenever she would talk to me on the phone. For someone who did virtually nothing the last few years of her life, never worked outside of the home and had no hobbies, my schedule sounded extremely full to her. I can remember telling her that I had time to listen to whatever she wanted to talk about, but being the meek, accommodating person she was, she didn’t want to add to my “busy schedule.”
While taking this time to reflect and regroup, I have had a hard time getting to sleep. I feel guilty that I am not busy. I feel like I need to be achieving more. I lay down at night and lament that I didn’t accomplish more, didn’t DO more. Although my intent is to get my “head right” before getting back into the swing of teaching a workshop, auditioning for a show and stage managing another, I feel somewhat guilty taking a moment for myself.
I began reading the book “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” today. It quotes a hospice nurse named Bronnie Ware in Australia who cared for people in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded that the most common regret these people nearing the end of their life shared was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
The book poses the question, “What if society encouraged us to reject what has been accurately described as doing things we detest, to buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like?” Now this is certainly a first world problem, but a problem nonetheless.
The very next paragraph asks the question that brings me to what I am sharing today, “What if we stopped celebrating being busy as a measurement of importance? What if instead we celebrated how much time we had spent listening, pondering, meditating, and enjoying time with the most important people in our lives?”
Having watched two very different parents- one who was always too busy and one who was never busy at all, I find myself pulled between the need to constantly be accomplishing something, showing the world how much I can get done in a day and how vital I am to the world actually turning and just wanting to reflect, create and observe the world as it turns without my input.
I guess the question boils down to a quote by poet Mary Oliver. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
