What Do We Mean By ‘Busy’?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines busy as:

‘industrious, diligent……actively engaged or occupied. Busy chiefly stresses activity as opposed to idleness or leisure.’

It’s easy to understand why busyness is seen as a virtue. After all, it sounds like being a responsible, hard-working adult making a contribution to society and on the road to success.

But experience tells us that it’s not that simple. For many of us, the experience of busyness looks like this:

• Lacking purpose. We are busy with the urgent and not the important, and feel restless and frustrated because we don’t have time for the things we value.

• Driven by things we are unaware of – like unmet needs for validation, our inability to manage anxiety, and the need for distraction, or

• Led by skewed thinking – most often the lie that when we add something to our schedule we can ‘just fit it in’, when the reality is that something has to give.

We are in fact not just busy, but too busy – and in the messiest kind of way. I think of it like this:

Many of us are carrying a mental, physical and emotional load that prevents us from fulling enjoying and engaging with life.

Some of this load can be seen on the surface – in our ‘to-do list’, but much of it sits below the surface. Our feelings, motivations and internal life also influence how much we have to do, and how we experience life.  But we can’t shift any of this without awareness.

We need to shine a light on these things in a way that opens the door for change, and offers practical tools for living differently.

Let’s turn the light on.