Sunday, July 11, 2010

Busy, Busy, Dreadfully Busy...

I try mightily to strike the word "busy" from my vocabulary.  It irks me to hear how busy folks are, though I could never fully articulate why.   This lady does a great job of capturing my feelings in a cogent way. 

One point from her blog that especially resonates is busy=important and therefore is a virtue.  That has always struck me as patently false.  I view self-reported busyness as a symptom of either insecurity or as the author points out, disorganization.

I've noticed, though, that the busiest amongst us rarely have time to tell us how busy they are.  They are just out there doing.  Those lamenting their busy-ness are often those loaded up with strictly voluntary commitments.  They usually are good things, but how often do we lose out on God's best for us, for our family because we settle for busy goodness?  Maybe it's not an either/or and I'm willing to concede that God's best for us at times can be that busy goodness, but I have a hunch that it's not nearly as often as we conflate the two.

Busyness also seems to be more a complaint of women.  Perhaps because we do not compartmentalize as well as men and tend to think of all our categories and commitments concomitantly whereas men can lock away their "work" and their "home" and the like into non-overlapping areas?  Women tend to operate smack in the center of the Venn diagram whereas men seem to move between the three circles without being sucked into the center.

I'd like to think on this more and expound further, but I'm, well, you know...

Blessings,
Holly