Crazy Busy? Let’s Talk About Time…
Let’s talk about Time
Do you have time to listen to my story?
It’s that gorgeous time of year when the cultural and religious holidays, Passover and Easter, occur. They respectively invite people to celebrate freedom and rebirth as families and friends gather together. Both holidays grew out of older Earth holidays, some of which are still celebrated today, such as Charshanbe Suri, the Persian/Iranian fire jumping festival that welcomes the spring season.
They coincide with the beginning of SPRING* on Earth (*in the northern hemisphere) as we can now take delight in the buds, flowers and the growth of green plants as they free themselves from the deeps of the soil and come rising up, enticed by the increasing warmth and light of the sun.
But do we remember to stop and truly see them?
Remember the saying: Stop and smell the roses? Or Alice Walker’s character Shug in the Color Purple saying: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”
One aspect of the Passover story that’s told when families and friends gather around Seder tables to retell the original story is that the Jewish people fleeing oppression needed to hurry up so fast, heading into the desert to find their freedom, that they didn’t have time to wait for bread to rise and so matzo, an unleavened flatbread, was baked instead and is still eaten during Passover today.
We live in a time of perpetual hurrying, of busyness. It throws us off center. Constant busyness deprives us of expressing our natural creativity and joy. Even when we’re not outwardly busy our minds often race and overwhelm us with lists of to-do’s. Busyness has become a badge of importance, proof of being “productive”, and it is addictive.
We have allowed time to become a tyrant that rules us, rather than a space to open into, and it is we who can depose the tyrant if we wish to. Productivity alone is a false god, yang without yin, a worship of only growth, ignoring nature’s cycles of birth and death, the growth and decay that make space for the endless creativity of Nature. And this is what is available to us, too, for we are part of Nature.
Below is a piece I wrote about this recently…
Crazy Busy? No thanks!
{click on image below to watch me read this piece}
People often apologize for asking for any of my time, saying they understand that I am “crazy busy”, or they tell me that they are “crazy busy” when sharing with me about their lives.
But I am neither.
If you like the feeling of being crazy busy, great, you can keep it, but I am never busy anymore. I have banished busyness as an approach to living my life.
My time is sometimes quite full.
Fullness lands in my body differently than “busy” does.
Busy pushes/pulls/propels me to keep moving and doing, with one eye always on the future. In perpetual motion and yet perpetually stuck, wondering what I need to do next to keep up with my life.
The other word, and the approach it invites, guides me to open into the fullness of whatever I am experiencing in the moment.
It matters, because the difference is that busy is often crazy-making. I know. I’ve lived that way most of my life!
I find fullness more enriching.
I ask, “What do I want to fill my life with?”
Of course we don’t get to opt out of some less than delightful “to-do’s” but how we frame them can shift how we experience them.
My life is quite full, but rarely busy, according to the new story I now tell myself, and somehow this has created more open time and space, too.
Yes, this story suits me better.
Try it. You might like it too.
