Reading:
Excerpt from The ‘Busy’ Trap by Tim Kerider (New York Times, June 30, 2012)
“If you live in American in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot o people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts at the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence."
Sermon:
In the past week, how many people here have used the
phrase “I’m so busy,” or “I have too much to do,” or something in that same
spirit.
We are living in an epidemic of “busyness.” This
morning’s reading came from an article in the New York Times from June of 2012.
A quick search through the internet though, shows that it’s an article that has
been written, in differing forms, pretty consistently over the past decade.
And Mr. Kreider is correct, it has become our default
answer to things. “How are you?”
“So busy!”
I am, myself, not immune to this. Just Thursday after
I went home for dinner before I returned to church for the meeting or the Board
of Trustees, I told Denis that I left my laptop AND my iPad at work… on
purpose. His surprised expression contained a strong lesson to me.
I am never without a computer, an iPad or a
smartphone.
Never.
Which means I never really disconnect.
As I was writing this, I was sort of hoping I’d be
able to catch someone texting during church or checking their email. I was
hoping this because part of me thought it’d be funny and ironic, but I wouldn’t
want to shame anybody for actually doing so.
Sometimes I have a sardonic sense of humor….
Even our dog, Toulouse, has taught me a lesson about
my computer usage at home. Whenever I close my laptop, he perks up and looks
around, because he thinks I’m heading for the door, and he likes to go along
wherever the car goes.
So the dog taught me that I spend too much time on the
computer at home, and I really only close the computer to leave.
Who’s training whom?
All last church year we used monthly themes to guide
our time together. We explored nine topics: Vision, Evil, Covenant, God,
Creation, Religious Authority, Redemption, Freedom and Mercy.
I know that on first glance, not all of those topics
were ones people were terribly interested in hearing about from a Unitarian
Universalist pulpit, but by the time the year was over I heard a lot of
positive comments about the idea of using the monthly themes.
The themes this year are: Vocation & Calling,
Unity & Diversity, Gratitude, Peace, Grace, Prayer/Spiritual Practice,
Letting Go, Salvation and Truth.
Which makes this month’s theme Vocation & Calling.
So, why then, a service on the Problem of Busyness,
when it can be argued that Vocation and Calling are all about being busy?
Busyness can get in the way of your true call to a
vocation or an avocation. Busyness can become a screen or a fog which clouds
your vision about what is truly of deepest value to you. Unless you turn off
all of your electronics and go for a walk in the woods, take a drive out to one
of the reservoirs at night to look at the Milky Way, how will you listen to
your deepest self to find out what matters most to you?
Sure, you could go along, living life, bouncing from
activity to activity, driving your kids from soccer practice to viola lessons,
but what are you teaching yourself about what matters to your inner poet, your
inner day-dreamer, your inner philosopher?
By rushing them from place to place, what are you
teaching your children about their own inner poet?
To quote our own Transcendentalist forebear, Henry David
Thoreau “It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what
are we busy about?”
Now not all of us are lucky enough to be friends with
a man like Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose back yard we can build a little home
near a pond and spend some time contemplating life, and then write a book about
our experiences.
But you might have a friend named Ralph. Or know of a
little place you can stay for a lessor time than two years, and sit in the
quiet and think about big important and little important things.
Mary DeMocker had an interview about climate change with
nature writer and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore in 2012. Dr. Moore is
Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University.
There are two quotes from DeMocker’s interview that I
think are relevant to today’s sermon. Particularly placed in juxtaposition. The
first is:
“Are
we going to let it all slip away—all those billions of years it took to evolve
the song in a frog’s throat or the strip in a lily—because we are too busy?”
and
the second is:
“The
thought that we might be losing songbirds, trading them for something I don’t
care about at all, like running shoes, makes me angry. And still I drive to the
store and buy running shoes.”[1]
Dr. Moore is the author of 9 books on nature and
philosophy. She teaches in the School of History, Philosophy and Religion. This
is a thinking person, a person whose spent some serious time investigating
questions of ultimate importance, and yet even she buys the running shoes.
I brought this up so that you don’t have to leave here
feeling like a total failure at living a spiritual life that is well and deeply
integrated with all of nature. That we do make compromises in our lives, that
the spiritually pure action isn’t always the practical action.
We can’t all be Thoreau.
But neither should we throw our hands up in the air in
frustration and give up at the first, second or 157th thing that
tries to separate us from our desire to figure out a way to live a life that is
balanced with the earth, and with that which is of the ultimate importance.
Busyness is a problem. Busyness has become our default
as a culture. Busyness has become a mechanism by which we can avoid the very
uncomfortable questions of meaning and meaning making in our lives.
Busyness is an avoidance technique, disguised as
virtue.
Busyness steals time away from deep contemplation
about what your soul really wants in life.
What is your busyness keeping you from discovering?
How are you using busyness to hide something from
yourself?
Going back to the story I shared with “the kids”
earlier, you do know that those stories are also for you, right? Going back to
the story, who do you think has a deeper, richer, more awake life? Is it
Whitney the Go-Getter, or is it Hollis, the contemplative one?
It seems to me that a life led by default, the kind of
life where when you ask someone how they are, and you expect “I’m fine,” as an
answer; the kind of life where you go to work, and there around the water
cooler you make routinized complaints about your spouse and children, the kind
of life wherein your theology is fed to you from a preacher who represents a
faith that is answer driven…
That sort of life is probably easier than the life you
may be leading.
The sort of life that lets you seek out answers from a
God who cares about you, so much so that not even a little sparrow falls
without His knowledge.
I will confess that I have sometimes yearned for a
life like that. A life wherein answers come when I ask the hard questions. And
I know that I am not alone in that.
But we are who we are, after all.
We don’t easily accept answers; we struggle against
them. This is in fact, part of our spiritual work: to struggle with the
meanings of things.
That struggling takes time, and our cultural default
of busyness robs us of the precious time we need to wrestle with ideas, hopes
and dreams.
Marianne Williamson wrote in her Course in Miracles,
an often quoted paragraph, one that is probably familiar to many of you, but
likely not all of us here in the room.
Our
deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are
powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens
us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and
fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of
God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened
about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are
all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of
God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as
we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the
same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically
liberates others.[2]
Busyness is a form of this shrinking that Ms.
Williamson is talking about. Busyness keeps us from attending to our light;
form re-filling the oil lamp, or polishing the reflective surface through which
our light shines into the world.
Busyness lets us hide our fears of inadequacy behind a
façade of “doing important things.”
Busyness does not mean doing things like going to work
and tending to your families, it means using activities to fill the gaps in
between.
The gaps that are frightening because they contain the
unknown, or more clearly, they contain space in which one encounters the
unknown. And like children afraid of the dark, many of us have not developed
the tools we need to encounter those gaps, to peer into the darkness of the
mystery of our lives.
And busyness is a good band-aid for that.
Or at least that’s how it appears.
Williamson asks the question “Who am I to be
brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to
be?”
I have some good and bad news for you.
I already know that you are brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous.
The jig is up.
The truth is out.
I see on a regular basis the wonderful people that
populate this room, that come together in meetings, that call each other when
sick.
You have fabulous written all over you.
You can’t hide behind busyness anymore.
Take time to eschew busyness, this pretend safety net
that our culture is so enamored of, a problem going back so far that even
Thoreau talks about it, and spend some time with your heart.
Listen to it beat.
Hear what it’s calling you to do.
Really, really listen.
Don’t respond with “But I can’t” or “it’s not
practical” or any other negating language.
Say instead “Thank you.”
Say instead “I may not be able to do that right now,
but I can work in the direction of that which is my burning passion.”
When you listen to your heart, may it reveal to you
what others can already see in you. May you offer the world liberation as you
live as an example of a person who is bold enough to follow their dreams and
through their work and example, help manifest a world more fair and loving.
