The busyness of life
There is always something to do. A message to answer, an appointment to remember, a job to finish, a meal to prepare, someone to call, somewhere to be. Even when the things themselves are quite ordinary, they can add up to a life that feels full from morning until night.
Being busy isn't necessarily a bad thing. Much of what fills our days matters to us. We work, care for people, contribute, create, organise, help and make plans. There can be real satisfaction in having things to do and people who need us.
I’m curious about what happens to our attention when there is always something waiting to be done.
The next thing
When we are busy, our attention can become focused on what comes next. We finish one thing and move on to another. We might eat breakfast while thinking about the morning ahead, have a conversation while remembering what we need to do afterwards, or sit down at the end of the day and find ourselves already thinking about tomorrow. We can be physically present while our attention is somewhere further ahead.
Sometimes that is useful. Planning helps us organise our lives and prepare for what is coming. Yet if our attention is always occupied with the next thing, I wonder what we might be missing in the thing that is happening now.
When busy becomes a habit
Perhaps busyness isn't only about how much we have to do. It can also become a way of being.
We can become so accustomed to filling our time that an empty space feels unusual. When there is nothing that needs our immediate attention, we might find something anyway. We check our phone, tidy something, make a list, find another task or start thinking about what we should be doing. Sometimes we are busy because life requires it. Sometimes we are busy because we have become used to being busy.
The two can feel similar.
What gets overlooked
When our attention is occupied by everything that needs doing, there may be less room for the things that don't ask anything of us. A conversation that has no particular purpose. The view outside a window. A cup of tea. The sound of birds. The space between one thing and the next. A thought that comes and goes without needing to be followed. A moment with someone we care about when neither of us needs to say anything. These moments can be easy to overlook because they aren't urgent. They don't appear on a list, and there is no particular achievement attached to them. Yet, they are still part of our lives.
Making a little space
Perhaps caring for our attention doesn't mean doing less. There will always be things that need doing, and many of them will be important. It might simply mean noticing the space between things — the moments when one thing has finished and the next hasn't quite begun.
We might pause for a moment and notice where we actually are, what we are doing and who is with us. We don't have to change anything. We might carry on with what we were doing. We might decide something can wait. Or we might simply notice that, for a moment, there is nothing else we need to attend to.
Our attention will drift towards the next task, the next thought and the next thing that needs doing. Perhaps the kindest response is not to try to empty our lives of busyness, but to occasionally return our attention back to the life that is already happening.
I wonder what you might notice today when there is nothing you need to do next.