To a fault, I am driven, organized, hard-working, strategizing, productive. This has led to positive results in academia, career, and personal life. It manifests my current circumstance ascending professionally, returning to graduate school, expanding co-professional pursuits, and - above all else - co-parenting two amazing high energy children with an equally driven, organized, hard-working, strategizing, and productive partner.
"How are you?" colleagues ask.
"I'm busy," I say.
Back to my original point: to a fault. While I have achieved many of the markers our society deems as success, I have failed to implement the self-understanding and mindful perspective of a whole human being. I have defaulted to defining my existence as: busy.
I am busy. What I mean to say is: I feel overwhelmed; I feel dissatisfied; I feel out-of-balance; I feel disenchanted with the notion of doing it all; I feel disillusioned by the relentless pursuit of "success"; I feel like I am giving short shrift to the most important parts of life; I feel like my daily concerns and stresses don't really actually matter that much in the grand scheme of things; I feel betrayed by constant overload leading to unimportant things; I feel saddened by vitality and vim slipping from my grasp; I feel a constant state of rushing, my psyche in constant state of inflammation. I do not feel alone in any of this; this is not a novel experience.
I sometimes joke that I just need to log enough experience until I can reasonably proclaim a mid-life crisis, quit my corporate job, and start my second career leading meditation retreats to save humanity. I just need to get the kids through college, then I am out. But I'm 38, and my youngest is 2, so that will put me at 60. I don't know if I will even be alive then. I hope so.
Busyness. Business. Fellow human beings: we have a problem here. Not just as individuals, but as organizations.
Now and then, Life disrupts our hardened sense of life we have so mindlessly created for ourselves. It pulls back the wool we have pulled over our eyes.The unexpected. The surprising. The a-ha moment. The random act of kindness. The crushing heartbreak. The opportunity. The whisper on the wind. The cognitive dissonance. The crashing waves. The smile. The old thing we come across that reminds us of the joy we once knew so clearly.
Do you notice?
This weekend, Life provided the serendipitous opportunity to attend a day-long yoga, meditation and silence retreat in communion with friends I had never before met. This morning, Life gave me the spark of joy that new falling snow as so long kindled in my soul. I am filled with gratitude.
All of this makes exceedingly clear that I have established a false choice. I do not have to choose between human doing and human being, between output and input, between productivity and wholeness. The choice, rather, is how I choose to show up; how I choose to listen; how I choose to notice; how I choose to respond; how I choose to Be; how I choose to Do.
The paradox: in one way, none of life matters; in another way, all of life matters. At the end of the day, there is something deeper, something that roots below the surface, Life whispering to life. In that sense, it really isn't a paradox at all. It just is. Here we are.
"Chaos is not a mess, rather it is the primal state of pure energy..."
I am not busy, I am alive. How will I respond?
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