The Mania Of Always Being Busy
We are at a stage in human evolution where we understand and are taught that to “be part of the world” you have to be “ constantly busy”.
This is something that should not surprise us since, if we were to challenge someone to ask another person how their family is doing, they certainly would not know how to respond.
He can’t even tell you how he feels emotionally. Why ? Because he is running out of time and is constantly busy.
We usually think: “The more we do, the more important we are” , and this comes from the fact that we live in a materialistic society which gives priority to “the more we have, the bigger we are” .
Few of us have that inner awareness that truly shows us who we are and what we’re here for.
Are we facing a social type disease? According to several social studies carried out, the answer is yes.
Children also suffer from this disease
You ask people about their emotional state and they answer you, tired: “I’m very busy and I have a thousand things to do… or I don’t have time to think about it.”
It is already complicated for us to realize this, but it is also true that our children and adolescents take very early on manias that destroy a quality of life where putting the priority on personal development at the level of time should be a daily task. .
We live by reduced standards and time spaces that push us to seek organizational and mental perfection, which at the same time causes us to lose a part of ourselves.
My challenge here is first to ask yourself the following questions: How did we come to live like this? When have we forgotten that we are human “beings” and not human “doings”?
This “always busy” craze is inherently destructive to our health and well-being.
It weakens our ability to focus completely on those we love the most and we then become that type of society that asks so much, paradoxically.
Being constantly active and doing self-imposed tasks does not allow us to think, be, and become complete humans.
Technology, our ally to “always be busy”
From the 1950s, the new era of technological innovations emerged, that of products that promised to make our daily lives easier or simpler.
Even so, today we still have as much time available and even less than a few decades ago.
For some of us, “the privileged” , the boundaries between work and personal life disappear.
We are always with a smartphone or a tablet, without disconnecting and without allowing ourselves to be present.
For some people, the reality is different because we need two different jobs to feed our family. 20% of children in the United States live in poverty and their parents often work for very low wages to enable them to live with dignity and be able to support themselves.
We could consider these people to be genuinely busy.
In some Muslim cultures, to ask a person how they are doing, we say in Arabic: ¿Kayf haal-ik ?, or, in Persian, ¿Haal-e shomaa chetoreh? Haal is a word for asking what spiritual state someone’s heart is in. The translation into our language would then be: “How is your heart doing right now?”.
This is why our “ how are you?” means exactly what we want to know about the other person.
When we ask how someone’s heart is doing, we don’t care how many emails they have left to process or how long they take to do this in their job.
We sincerely ask how your soul is doing, if it feels good, if it is in good health. If you still remember that you are a human being here and now.
We invite you, as a remedy for this “always busy” mania , to put your hand on the shoulder of the person you love, to look them in the eyes and to connect with them for a few moments.
Tell him what your heart asks of you and connect with his. We all need, at some point, to remember that we are human beings who need the essence of others in order to feel more alive and fulfilled.
