Being Busy

Do you feel busy right now? Like when you look at the week do you see an overwhelm of meetings, commitments, errands, plans, and responsibilities? Not just your plans but also the plans that involve others in your care and life? It so I’m with you, but it’s not necessarily how we want things to be or what's best for us.

When you think of being busy that means you already have so much on your plate that you don’t have the space to take on anything else. This means that you’re spending time maintaining things how they are, doing just enough to keep your head above water. A growth oriented life involves doing new things, new ways, with new points of excitement and challenge. Being too busy to take any of that on prevents you from creating that growth.

Or when you do add something even though you don’t have the space for it, which we do all the time, it will integrate with the wrong energy. Instead of being a source of excitement this new commitment immediately becomes a source of stress, and you immediately associate it as something that is making your life more difficult.

But why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we choose to live in a way that is overly demanding and busy? It all relates back to our basic human needs to belong, to be liked, and to be appreciated. We live in an achievement-rewarding culture, and for us to gain the acceptance of others we need to live in a way that fits the mold and is worthy of their praise and attention. So we stretch ourselves to do and achieve even when it’s not the best thing for us.

But the more influential piece to this is our ego. This also relates to our need to belong but addresses it in a different way. We’ve learned to associate what we do with what we’re worth, and in order to communicate our value to others we need to show that our time is valuable… So valuable that we don’t have much of it! So we choose to be busy and less available so that others value time with us more. This loop for external validation is completely driven by our ego.

Now the consequence to this is pretty significant. Being busy means we have less time to do things. Having less time to do things means we can’t take on new things that help us grow. If we’re not growing then we don’t have the momentum and excitement we need to pursue our dreams. And if we don’t pursue our dreams then we may look back at life and have regrets about how we spent our time.

Be busy doing the things you enjoy doing, of course, but that’s not all you’re busy doing. To make this real let me ask you this question - What are you busy doing that you don’t want to do or need to do?

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