Busyness of Life

This Friday evening  I was talking to a friend, and telling her how the only thing in life I’d want to change right now is to get Saturdays off, and she’s like….. I wish I had work on Saturdays too, …. I hate my work, but  I’d rather work than be at home.

Another older conversation with a friend who lives in Bombay; we’re discussing how she spends four to five hours a day travelling, and when I sound appalled, she’s like ‘ghar jaake bhi kya karna hai yaar, baate suno, kaam karo, I'd rather do this.

Both of these, while seemingly shocking, are fairly common place.  It’s filling in time with busyness. 

So how do we gauge if its good busyness? 

There are those who believe it's about being productive, about utility,  about meaning,  about potential.........different kinds of busyness....what really is it? 

                                        

A water colour by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in The Little Prince

It's about making friends with your busyness. You either create your busyness by choice, which is an ideal, or accept the busyness that exists by finding its positives, being aware that you're opting to stay there. It's the perception of lack of choice, the resentment that’s demolishing. It's sad to be bitter, which comes from holding deep rooted resentments. The feeling that life’s gone by and one hasn't really gotten a good shot at it, hasn't done what one wanted to, the it's been unfair. 

Can we accept that there was always a choice, and the 'no decision', or 'no choice' was also a choice? Maybe that would help make peace with the existing situation.

Make a choice, change or accept. Do not stay in the space of resentment. That's the killer.

“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in her soul-stretching meditation on the life of presence, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And yet most of us spend our days in what Kierkegaard believed to be our greatest source of unhappiness — a refusal to recognize that “busy is a decision” and that presence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being.

And it's said, one of the best treatments of the subject is also among the oldest: Roman philosopher Seneca’s spectacular 2,000-year-old treatise On the Shortness of Life— a poignant reminder of what we so deeply intuit yet so easily forget and so chronically fail to put into practice.

'You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… 

He talks of the dual demon of distraction and preoccupation — as an addiction that stands in the way of mastering the art of living:

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his own occupation, Seneca points to the study of philosophy as the only worthwhile occupation of the mind and spirit — an invaluable teacher that helps us learn how to inhabit our own selves fully in this “brief and transient spell” of existence and expands our short lives sideways, so that we may live wide rather than long. ' This one I love for obvious reasons....:)

So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.

Nineteen centuries later, Bertrand Russell, another of humanity’s greatest minds, lamented rhetorically, “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?”

Let's use these wake up calls. Step back and ask ourselves. Use it to drop any negativity there might be........ A renewed acceptance or thoughts of change....either's good