Insidious Busyness
Social capital has a new form: being busy. Check it out from Columbia researchers and the New York Times.
Taking this long-form, three-and-a-half month bike tour across Europe seems to be a departure from the typical logic of busyness, and in many ways it is. Yet at times I catch how the insidious drive to create busyness insidiously manifests in our dynamic nonetheless.
Most recently, it showed up for me as we pedaled across Southern France. We needed to cover a lot of ground, biking upwards of 50 miles a day and climbing through multiple mountain ranges. Spending six or eight hours in the saddle each day left little time for anything except eating, cycling, and logistics. In the background buzzed the touristic impulse to “see everything because we’re here.” After a full day of riding we’d take a quick shower and then head out to explore the environs—a constantly stimulating, forward-moving and outward-facing mode.
Constant forward movement makes me uneasy after a while. I feel too externalized, like I’m living in the front two inches of my body. Without space and time for the inward turn, I soon feel disconnected, uneasy, and irritable. In this long moment of incessant forward movement, coupled with the frantic drive to “see everything,” I was exhausted. I felt like a hungry ghost: hollow and ever-consuming.
It was then that I realized how busy we were making ourselves. That we’d subsumed the deeper spiritual inquiry into the “doing” of the trip. Distracted by too-complicated cue sheets through labyrinthine French cities, we’d lost touch with the larger questions of love and marriage.
Busy-ness had overtaken us: You can take the couple out of America, but you can’t take America out of the couple.
In this instance, The Busy showed up as biking for hours then racing to explore and getting up to do it again and again for days on end with little rest or reflection. But that’s just this iteration. Later in life it could take the form of running around from meeting to meeting and scheduled kid activities. The logic is the logic, regardless of the form it takes.
The solution, according to some authors on the subject, is to space out. Do nothing. Give the mind and heart time to roam freely. My question, then, is how to maintain stillness in energetic movement. How may I keep aware that The Busy is operating all the time, and so take the wise actions (or inactions!) to stay present and sane. Because whether on a heavenly bike tour or as a soon-to-be frazzled business school student, wherever I go, there I am.