The 'Busy' Cult
Crazy busy.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.
- The Busy Trap | Tim Kreider | New York Times
I don't know about you, but I must've thrown that phrase around for the last ten years with so much frequency that busy have become the new normal, the new successful. Busy seems to equal importance, or value. Busy have become the new black. When I tell my mom about the state of my life {that is, *surprise*, crazy busy}, she tells me to be thankful instead. And I am.
It's just that ...
Lately, the definition of successful has begun to take shape in another form. Whereas I used to think that success would mean a day full of nonstop, back to back to back meetings, a full eight hours of nonstop productivity --- I find myself craving for more time to breathe and be bored. Boring has always been my time to be curious and thus have led me to various discoveries.
Not that I cannot afford to un-busy myself. The truth is, even if numerous posts on this blog have said how the week was such whirlwind, I do have a choice. It just wasn't a choice I've taken a lot of times. It might be because being busy and feeling important can be so addictive, one cannot help but plunge into more and more work {both for primary occupation and secondary}. The world glorifies the hard worker --- and I wouldn't dare say otherwise. Where I am, busyness is self-imposed that we have really no one to blame but ourselves. A mangled sense of what should happen in one's day has driven many of us anxious, cranky and exhausted.
And surely, that's normal. But ...
At the end of the day, I can't find the meaning in the thousands of words I've spewed. Or the numbers I've crunched. Or strategies built like fortresses. Or tactics that come like typhoons. There's a sense of emptiness that comes with losing a day to the bed, mastering the art of doing nothing, daydreaming, wishing, hoping, singing. When I think about retirement, the fuss of which I get to deal with everyday, needing to plan for it, I think of the possible things I could do when I'm older. I think of doing nothing when I'm old, gray and wrinkly and I think ----
... those are pretty much what I want to do now. I want to step foot in a plane once again and just get lost in thoughts or in streets. I want to incubate dreams and plans where I can see the clouds billowing and trees swaying with the water providing the soundtrack to my day. High stress levels are surely as indispensable as any other nutrient to a city girl, but maybe there is more to life than trying to squeeze so much in concrete, in industrial furniture and high speed internet.
Surely, there has to be more to life than that.
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