In our American culture, one thing is valued above almost all else: busy-ness. Business? Busyness? (I could look it up but it’s May Bee and I promised just to hammer out these blog posts and stop trying to be perfect. What? You’re not the boss of me.) Anyway, what’s the first thing you say when someone asks how you’ve been? Probably 9 times out of 10 the answer will some iteration of “SO busy!” It’s like a knee-jerk reaction that we don’t really even give much thought to. “Oh my gosh I’m so busy I don’t even have time to breathe!”
I’m guilty of doing this. And when I stop to think about it, the thing is I’m really not that busy. My life is full, to be sure. I do a lot of really neat things, like play golf and clean the toilets in my house on a regular basis. But I also have plenty of time to read and go on Twitter (which, reminds me, I really need to stop going on Twitter) and binge watch Netflix with my husband and walk my dog with my friends.
Sure there are a lot of people who are truly busy. They work three jobs just to make ends meet for their families and they have pretty much zero time to do anything for themselves. But the majority of us don’t have lives like that and so we race around making ourselves busy because we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s somehow shameful to have downtime. In fact, “New research suggests that we use a lack of time as a status symbol, bragging about our packed schedules,” according to this article on Headspace. Yikes. Makes me want to move to Italy where having a lot of leisure time is viewed as a status symbol.
Just some food for thought. If you’re truly crazy busy, there’s nothing wrong with that! But if you’re saying it because you think it makes you sound more ambitious or whatever, just be mindful of that. Maybe it’ll open up some actual space in your mind and your life for, *gasp* time to chill.
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