I see busy people everywhere, busy at work (projects, meetings, dead-lines) and busy at home and during the week-ends. We want to be informed; we want to stay in touch with our friends; we want to read as many books as possible; we want to shop, to find the best deals or the best clothes. Basically we want to make the best of our time and we feel that there is never enough of it for all the things we want to do.
I hear people saying that they always find something to do, that they are always busy and they are not wasting any time. I think it’s a good thing to be diligent, to do your work thoroughly and with passion. I am wondering, though, if finding always something to do is about diligence or about an inability to stop.
For me, my grandmother was an example of diligence. She had never avoided work and she would do all her work thoroughly from morning ’till evening. I had never heard her complaining that she is too busy or she has too many things to do. But when there was no work or when there was a religious holyday she had no problem just sitting on the porch or near the stove. I loved and admired her very much and I wanted to be as diligent as her in my life. But I think that, sometimes, being that way becomes an excuse for the inability to stop.
I found two reasons that prevent us from stopping:
The first one is that being always busy transforms you into a martyr. You are always doing things for the others and you never arrive at doing things for yourself. And you make sacrifices for the others and they are never thankful. The advantage of being a victim is that you think you’re special, you think that you are better than others; you think that you are altruist while others are selfish and from a moral point of view you are above them (see The Drama Triangle and the old giving and giving and giving…).
The second is that if you stop and you choose to do nothing you remain alone with your thoughts. And, if you listen to your inner thoughts you may not like what they tell you. Each of us has an inner voice that speaks the truth and sometimes we do not like that truth. This is why we keep ourselves busy, so that we are not obliged to listen to it.
The Italians have a phrase for the “activity” of doing nothing: “dolce far niente” which can be roughly translated to “sweet doing nothing”. Have you tried it lately? If not, take 10 minutes right now and do nothing just to see what happens. You might say that you are at work and you cannot just sit not doing anything (you have e-mails to read, you have meetings, not to mention your usual work). But nothing will happen if you take 10 minutes away from that; after all you have been reading my post for five minutes.
Try it! You might be surprised.
