Person 1: How are you?
Person 2: Busy!! How about you?
Person 1: Yeah, me too. I have so much to do.
This must be one of the most common answers to the question of how we are. I hear it daily and often fall into the trap of using it myself. Every monday morning when I go to work, this same response keeps coming up. So, I would like to have a look at what we really mean when we say "I'm busy!!". What is it to be 'busy'? And why are we so attached to it as an answer?
The first place to start is with a dictionary which says "having a great deal to do". Now this is an accurate statement and in this sense we are always busy and always have been. From the moment we are born into the game of life there is a great deal of things we have available to us to do. We can learn how to walk, go to school, university, find a job, a partner, buy or build a house, have children, retire and of course have fun a long the way. Over a lifetime there is much that a human is out to accomplish and fulfill on. Some achieve all of them and more, some don't and some choose a different pathway all together. However for each of us when we wake up, we are confronted (or inspired) by the work we out to do that day, week or year.
What is curious as I have highlighted in the previous sentence is that there is an emotional context to the word busy that is not present in the definition. When we use the word 'busy', in this context it seems to implies more. It is not just that we have great deal to do, as that is always present, but somehow it is that being busy is a problem. Rarely does anyone jump out of bed in excitement about the busy day before them. No, busy is something to be overcome, something to deal with, a frustration in the way of what would otherwise be a perfect life.
So, when we say we are busy, it lands as a constraint on our lives. It is that which stops us from being happy, free and able to fulfill on what is important us.
"I would love to just relax but I am busy."
"If only I had the time to pursue my art or music, but I am just so busy."So, given that there is always a great deal to do in life, more than can ever be fulfilled, so that being busy is a fact of life. Why do we relate to it like a constraint? Busy is just the way the world is. There is what we do, what we don't do and tomorrow there is another day.
Well, I have a conclusion. The use of the term busy has nothing to do with what you actually are doing in life. Being busy is instead a convenient and socially acceptable way for each of us to avoid responsibility for our lives and survive in life. Why busy is a constraint, is because for many of us while we are doing things in life, we are not doing the things we want in life. We are doing the things that others or society want us to do. Doing the things that make us look good, help us fit in. And we don't want to admit that or take on that we can actually have life the way we want it.
I do not want to discount that there is a lot to do and each day we make (sometimes difficult) choices about what we are going to do and what we are not going to do and we cannot fulfill on all of it. But when you make choices about what to do each day that are consistent with what you want to do and what your life is about. Then there is no busy, there is just doing. Waking up in the morning might occur as an opportunity to do more of the things you want rather than another day at the office. And then when someone ask you how are you, you might just say
"I am great, there is a lot I am going to do today and I am really looking forward to doing it. Let me tell you about it..."
