Too Busy Being Busy?

People running here and there. No time to stop, no time to think, no time to even really live...

When we are busy most of us are not able to live consciously in the present, instead, we are caught up in thoughts and all of the activities that spring from them. If we strip these thoughts right down to their bare basics we can quickly discover that all of them are about some preconceived hopes or fears about the future or the past. This is the condition in which we normally live. It is distracted, pre-occupied, stressful and very unbalanced.

Busy-ness is a kind of modern-day insanity which is overrunning our lives.
Even in our moments of non-busyness, we often find ourselves reaching for something to engage our attention and this continues from the moment we open our eyes in the morning until we shut them again at night. We live in a kind of fever and stress has become a substratum in our day to day existence in the modern world.

Unless we consciously take the time out to pause and be still we are caught on a wheel of perpetual movement and change. We are little better than mice on a treadmill which is going around and around. We are working so hard but we are not actually getting anywhere.

There are most certainly psychological impacts when we are constantly distracted, and constantly busy.

There is nothing so useless as

doing efficiently that which

should not be done at all.

Peter. F. Drucker

One impact of this condition is the sense of acceleration, the feeling that time is speeding up. We perceive this as something which is happening to us and we feel it as a kind of pressure which manifests itself in our lives as stress.

And stress, as we all know, directly affects our health, our moods, our thoughts and the quality of our lives. It also affects the way that we interact with others and has powerful repercussions on the lives of those with whom we are close.

In actuality, of course, time and space are relative and yet when our mind is engaged in the busyness of living from day to day we become entangled in the machinations of time passing in units of hours, minutes and seconds. We get caught up in the drama of events and we lose our sense of a wider and vaster perspective.

If there is one disease that pervades modern society it is that of stress which can condition our behaviour in so many ways and adversely affect our sense of well being and health. When our anxiety levels are high we are certainly not at peace and our lives are certainly not balanced.

When our attention is constantly engaged and distracted and busy we can easily miss out on the very things that give us a sense of meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment in our day to day lives.

*****

Recently I was reading a story about two psychologists from a university. They conducted a test which was designed to indicate what kinds of triggers and conditions engender in people certain types of behaviour. In this instance, compassion and empathy.

In two separate groups, one therapist asked the students to walk to a class where they were each expected to give a short speech. The chosen theme for the day was compassion and empathy.

The other psychologist sent his group of students off to another class, ostensibly telling them the same thing, however, he led his group to understand that they were already late for their class. The first group, however, had been told that they had plenty of time until their class would begin.

Meanwhile, an actor had taken up a position on the pathway along which each group would pass. The actor made the appearance of being very unwell and in distress.

What happened next was interesting. It turned out that the theme and topic on which each person was expected to speak in their up and coming class, had little if any impact on their behaviour. (Remember, that day the theme was about empathy and compassion.)

Only 10 per cent of those who had been told they were late for class stopped to help the person in distress, whereas, 60 per cent of the group who thought that they had plenty of time stopped to help out.

Busyness is bad for empathy and compassion. Those of us who have spent time in big cities have seen many examples of this. I am sure that most of us can also attest to examples of this in our own day to day lives if not personally, then in numerous instances that we can observe happening around us.

*****

It is very extraordinary to notice how our sense of perceived 'time' can affect the way that we behave and react to different situations.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have the following, also equally thought-provoking example which took place during an excursion into the Andes.

An archaeologist hired some Inca tribesmen to lead him to an archaeological site deep in the mountains. After they had been moving for some time the tribesmen stopped and insisted they would go no further. The archaeologist grew impatient and then angry. But no matter how much he cajoled, the tribesmen would not go any further. Then all of a sudden and quite unanimously they completely changed their attitude. Inexplicably, to the archaeologist, they picked up the gear and set off once more. When the bewildered archaeologist later asked the tribesmen why they had stopped and refused to move for so long, but then suddenly appeared to have changed their minds they answered, “We had been moving too fast and had to wait for our souls to catch up.

This may sound very quaint in our digital world where everything moves at breakneck speed and yet there is a very profound truth buried within the simple tribe people's home-grown wisdom.

When we rush around continuously never giving ourselves time to be still, to be silent, to be quiet and to be present in the present we rob ourselves of something utterly fundamental to our health, wellbeing and sense of day to day fulfilment.

Our existence is rooted in a truth so unspeakably near to us that we fail to recognise it. In the midst of our busy-ness, there is just one thing which is utterly essential for us to do. Everything else, in the light of this truth is completely meaningless.

To find out who and what we really are is the single most important thing we can do in this life. By refocusing our attention away from being the 'doer' we can train ourselves to perform actions even while we remain quiet and at peace within our sense of 'awareness.'