Wouldn’t you love to reduce the busyness in your life? To take a breather from the GO-GO-GO lifestyle you’re living?
What if, instead of all the busyness of work and those tiresome obligations, you could do all the things you really wanted to do? Like spending more time with family, reading a book, going for a run, having long conversations with your best friends, doing yoga or meditation, taking a nice long walk on the beach and having lunch with your loved ones afterwards. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Wouldn’t it be amazing to do fun, enjoyable activities without the voice in the back of your mind reminding you to do ‘more important’ stuff?
How nice to live a life of less busyness and more time to live life your way!
For most people, being less busy seems so far out of reach. Everything seems too important and too crucial; there is so much that must be done – they’ve got one hand swiping the big screen trying to keep up with the latest and greatest, and a phone (yes, we still call these portable communication things ‘phones’) in the other hand with a text coming in, post going out, photo being shared, a meeting coming up, appointments overlapping, multi-tasking…
“Sorry, been crazy busy; don’t have time and got to go! Running late for ____.” What? Not so sure, but they know it’s the thing, think it’s important, are certain it matters and don’t want to miss out!
It’s so easy to get caught up in this epidemic of busy-ness. Busy-ness has become the social norm. You get sucked in, stuck and seeing no way out of this powerful spinning spiral. You live with a resigned acceptance that this is just how it is. You keep busy because that’s how you reach accomplishment, achievement, goals and success…
Wait a minute!
We’re acting as if busy-ness will bring us success, bring us self worth and social status, help us understand where we are in the bigger picture, help us know what we’re all about.
But does busyness bring satsifaction?
Isn’t it more likely that being so completely caught up in this cycle of keeping busy and doing too much will prevent you from getting a sense of who you are and what matters? When you’re doing big stuff, important stuff, you don’t have time for stillness, silence, and the simplicity of just being… which is the when you’re really better able to understand where you are in the bigger picture and what you’re all about.
Don’t have time or don’t make time?
If you stop for just a second and take a serious look, you’ll see that simplicity is pretty darned close. Being less busy is a matter of choice. If you’re ready, you can choose simplicity, choose to let go of your busy-ness…
Try it, even just for a minute. Stop everything you’re doing and just notice how you feel, what you see, what you hear. Stop and notice your surroundings and ignore your phone for a moment. You may be surprised to discover that the hurried world will carry on just fine without you paying attention to every text and post that pops up in the moment.
The more often you make time to be in stillness, silence, and the simplicity of just being, the closer you get to knowing your true essence and feeling more satisfied with your life. Small moments of being less busy have a positive, accumulated effect on your life.
Busy-ness is Self-created and Self-inflicted. It’s up to you. You can choose to stop and pause for a moment. Or you can keep on going, being as busy as you always are. But honestly, how’s that working for you?
Benefits of Letting Go of Your Busy-ness
We often try to pack life with so much stuff to do that we actually stop living life. We stop enjoying what we’re doing right now in anticipation of what we have to do next. If you pay attention to your thoughts, you’ll see this happens all the time – thinking about what you’re going to have to get done by lunch while you’re eating your breakfast, instead of just sitting there enjoying your breakfast. Sometimes you may not even register that you even ate breakfast at all and will feel hungry a short while later!
Preventing Dis-ease and Lack of Focus
Ever feel like I do, that you have so much you need to get done that you can’t resist the urge to jump right into it? Some days I’ll skip my morning movement and meditation sessions, the two things I know with certainty that help me to be more productive during the day, that help keep my body more comfortable, that help me feel calmer, more at ease, and allow me to approach my day with more clarity, confidence, focus, and enjoyment.
Sometimes I get fooled into thinking that I’ll have more time to get things done if I skip the things that help me to live most fully, most happily. When I do that, I end up in a state of busyness and dis-ease, a buzz of unsettledness and unproductiveness, exactly the opposite of why I jumped right in the first place. Skipping the practices that help me, like meditation and movement, in order to have more time for ‘doing things’ is counterproductive. It doesn’t work. It leads to increased muscle tension, rising anxiety, elevated pain levels… all the things I can avoid by making some time to slow down, to move, to breathe, to meditate, to be present in the now.
When you pay attention to yourself, you’ll observe that when you don’t take a much needed break in your day, you end up feeling rushed and anxious. On the other hand, when you take a break and engage in something you love – like sitting with a cup of tea or going for a walk – even for a short time, you feel calmer and more relaxed when you get back to your ‘doing-ness’ and are more productive.
Feeling more balanced and whole
It’s when you get busiest that you’re least likely to take the time to just stop and enjoy the moment; to live in the moment, without preparing for the next moment, and the moment after that, and the next week, and the next month.
More often than not, you don’t notice you need to take the time to slow down until you’re exhausted or you get sick for the umpteenth time or your temper becomes short or your pain levels go up or your headaches come on or you start losing sleep or you feel overwhelmed and buried beneath the weight of being too busy, having too much to do, having to always be ‘on’.
Sometimes you just need to be off. To reset, to check in with yourself, to just be. To allow your body to rest and relax. To feel reconnected with yourself and whole.
The problem with being busy is that it makes you feel like you don’t have time for turning off, that you don’t have time for taking care of yourself, that it’d be selfish to have some ‘me’ time.
But the truth is you’re at your best when you take care of yourself. Stopping the busy-ness, even for a short time each day, allows you to be better in all aspects of your life, from work to home to play. It’s a misconception to think that being busy equals being productive. It’s often quite the opposite, resulting in doing a bunch of things a bit half-assed, with half a mind, rather than doing a few things with your whole attention (full-assed?), doing it well, and actually enjoying it.
It’s those experiences you have when you’re less busy that you remember most, that become remarkable, that give meaning to your life. It’s the things you slow down for that you’ll look back on some day with fondness, a smile, maybe some tears, that you’ll one day be grateful for experiencing.
At the end of your life, what do you think will matter most? The things you that kept you busy, that you told yourself you had to do? Or the experiences you slowed down for – that you let go of busy-ness to make time for, so you could enjoy your life?
We bet it will be the latter.
