In just one day last week, I met individually with four persons, each of whom at one point in our conversations said that he/she was far too busy to have time for introspection and self-care. By day’s end, yet again I was struck by how the busyness of our lives stunts our souls. It’s epidemic.
So I wonder if you can relate to those persons. Do you also feel entirely justified in enumerating all the very logical and pressing reasons why you just cannot find or make time for your own inner life? And yet when you happen accidentally to slow down, does your soul prick you with sentiments of emptiness?
We surf our lives, just as we surf pages of the internet. As others are addicted to the internet, we are addicted to a busyness which often leaves our relationships and lives as shallow as the knowledge gleaned from internet blurbs. Yet just as addictive internet usage affects brain structure and attention duration, so too a lifestyle of incessant activity affects our souls.
After meeting with the four persons mentioned above, I found myself thinking of Henry David Thoreau sitting upon the steps of his self-hewn cabin beside Walden Pond. Thoreau recounts how he watched a family of townspeople laboring to move cartloads of household possessions to another home. He ponders the hours of labor required to purchase and then to maintain each and every possession, and wonders who is richer: they with their possessions, or he with time to read the great works and to ponder life beside the Pond (his literary symbol for his Self)?
Thoreau’s two-year sojourn beside Walden Pond was in part an experiment in voluntary simplicity. With reference to how the busyness of daily life thwarts our souls, I wonder how voluntary simplicity might mitigate our busyness and restore to us time for a more balanced an inner-directed life. No, I don’t propose that you contemplate a simplicity of lifestyle as radical as Thoreau’s.
Yet in one respect or another, can your life be simplified so as to allow you some leisure to support Being and an inner-directed life? Rather than “do” your life, could you allow yourself the ease of relaxing into your life by simply doing less? Are there commitments or obligations which you could reduce in order to provide you with the comfort of time to be? Are there possessions whose upkeep is more time-consuming than the pleasure they provide?
Despite and because of our addiction to doing, it helps occasionally to step back from the trance of our busyness to reevaluate just what all that activity really is accomplishing while time slips by to a certain end. Is the beauty of a blossom, the companionship of a friend, or your very own preciousness really less important than your next to do?
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