In being busy doing what are we busy being?

When was the last time you said or heard someone say they were really busy? 

No doubt it was fairly recently. 

A fact of life is that we’ll likely feel that things are busy whether it is with work, with everything outside of work or both. 

And so often busy-ness begets busy-ness. 

Once we’ve finished this project, we need to catch up on all the other things we’ve neglected? 

Or a busy week blends into a busy weekend trying to fit all the things we want to do or have been too busy to do into the two days before busy-ness resumes elsewhere. 

How often do we slow down to ask what is making us busy?

And what does what we’re busy doing mean we are busy being?

A search for definitions of ‘busy’ come up with: 

Adjective: ‘Having a great deal to do’ or ‘Excessively detailed or decorated’

Verb: ‘to keep oneself occupied’

What stands out from those definitions?

The adjectives suggest a sense of scale, a ‘great’ deal and ‘excessive’. While the definition of busy relating to decoration or appearance may not be what we’re talking about here it can be quite a good way to look at our busy-ness:

To what extent is our busy-ness us living an excessively detailed or overdecorated life? 

The verb talks about occupation.

Often, we say we’re busy when we think about work, or whatever it is we see as work. 

But to say we’re busy can be both positive and negative. It depends what we’re busy with and if we want to be busy and what is behind our busy-ness.

What is our busyness about?

What are we occupying ourselves with? 

If we are busy in this way for the rest of our lives how would we feel? 

Many people have said that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour, so it is likely what we are busy with or even the fact we are making ourselves busy now, will be the case in the future.

What if being busy is a choice? 

It feels very difficult to write, aware of how easy it is for things to suddenly feel busy, but time is always finite, we cannot control it, so we actually always have a limit to how much we can do.

What we can control is how we use that time, how busy we want to make ourselves and with what. 

So what would you like to be busy with? That is, what would you like to occupy yourself with? 

What if busy-ness is the barrier to being busy with what we really want? 

What is behind our being busy?

Or, what are we assuming that keeps us busy? 

Or, what are we avoiding by being busy with what we are doing? 

In Rising Strong, Brene Brown talks about numbing as a way of avoiding reckoning with, or fully experiencing our emotions. For her, reckoning with our emotions is a core part of a process of living a wholehearted life, that is living our lives from a place of worthiness, which means being vulnerable and pursuing what matters to us, aware that it may not work out. 

In being busy, what emotions might we be numbing ourselves from and what is the potentially fuller, wholehearted life that busy-ness is keeping us from?

To be busy with what we really want, what do we first need to accept or come to terms with? 

For me, busy-ness is a brilliant way of avoiding scary but important things like sharing my work, a scary thing because I cannot know what the response will be to something I care about. Yet, if I am busy-ing myself with everything but sharing my work, by the the end of the day, I may not have done what I really want but I can point to the busy-ness that says ‘this is why I didn’t and that I’m way too busy to do it tomorrow and anyway, it’s okay I’m still good enough, look at all the other things you did’.

What is behind your busy-ness? 

In what we are busy with, what life are we choosing for us? 

What do we need to be busy with what we really want to be busy with? 

What would the world be like if we were all busy - that is occupying ourselves - doing the things that really mattered to us and that allowed us to be all of us?