Being Busy

Can I tell you something? I hate being busy. I hate not having time to myself. I genuinely like being on my own, don’t feel sorry for me because I mean it. I really mean it. I feel like our society tells us that it’s good to be busy, being busy is the thing do be doing, it doesn’t really matter what you’re busy with. I was out with friends recently, one of them said ‘oh I’m so busy, I’ve got this and that to do.’ Another friend chirped in ‘I’ve got this and that an the other to do.’ I said ‘oh actually I’m not very busy at all this week.’ And it was like a shock to them. Like I’d admitted that I’d intentionally bought the wrong shoes (or something). It got me to wondering what is it with our generation’s preoccupation with business?

Here are three reasons, I think, we like to be busy.

Being busy protect us from having to invest in real relationships.If we’re constantly going from social situation to another, spreading ourselves thinly it means that no one knows us that well. It means that we get to spend a little bit of time with a lot of people. I personally don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to be. We see this in the life of Jesus, he spent his days with 12 others, sure he had other acquaintances but these 12 were really the people he spent time with. Even beyond that, he had a smaller circle within the disciples whom he was closer to. That, for me, speaks volumes.

Guys, please choose wisely who you spend your quality time with, it is important. If you want to be known and to know people the way to do it is to spend time, good time, with people, and unfortunately there are only 24 hours in a day. If however, you want to remain an enigma, carry on, being busy, not being known, but I am convinced that the loneliness will catch up with you some day.

It keeps us from considering what’s important.I know what’s important. Making time to call friends and family who are far, writing, thinking, reading. These things are important to me. So why do I construct ‘business’ in my life to prevent me from doing these things? It’s because these things are the most challenging things in my life, they make me consider who I am and what I’m about, they make me assess myself. That’s the most difficult thing I have to do. So if I’m busy doing other things, it is easy to push these things aside. Even though I know it’s these things that make me who I am. Sometimes, I don’t want to be who I am.

It makes us feel important.If you’ve always got something to do, it makes you feel important. It’s pretty simple really. We fill our time with things that aren’t important in order to make us feel important. We do it subconsciously. Often it not to make us look important to those around us, it’s simply that if we look in our diary’s and see that they’re full we feel popular.

So, that was Sarah McCarten’s guide to being busy. Please don’t for a minute think that I want you all to live like a hermit, I think it’s important to be doing stuff, I just think we need to think about the stuff we’re doing!