Busy vs Hurried

Yes, there seems to be a common recurring theme going on in my blogs the past month.  I have been using this space to work through the inner chaos that I often feel.  I know that I am not alone in feeling this inner chaos.


Yesterday I finally finished the book that I've been working on slowly for the past few weeks.  There has been a great deal to chew on, that is when the author wasn't literally hitting me up the side of the head with things that I needed to see.  The focus of the book was on taking care of your soul, that deepest part and often severely neglected part of each of us.


My soul has been filled with a lot of inner chaos.  There are many things that contribute to this but the one that seems to be the most prevalent and needs to be fixed first is the pace that I am living life at.  Since I started working with the neuropsychologist for my concussion, one of the goals was to look closely at what I have on my plate and to aggressively fight my overcommitted existence.  This has been HARD.  The things that I like and love to do are the things that would be easiest to eliminate - like volunteer work.  The things I like the least seem to be here to stay - like housework.  I have had to close doors to things that were hard to walk away from in order to heal.  Even with this cutting back, I am still finding my life very busy and full.


So is busyness the issue...  Perhaps...  There are times where I dream of what it would be like to not be busy.  The author of the book I've been reading made a point about busyness that I just could not overlook.  John Ortberg wrote,

Being busy is an outward condition, a condition of the body.  It occurs when we have too many thing to do.  Busyness is inevitable in modern culture.  If you are alive today in North America, you are a busy person.  There are limits to how much busyness we can tolerate, so we wisely find ways to slow down whenever we can.

Then he went on to talk about being hurried.  Being hurried is an inner condition of the soul where we are too preoccupied to be fully present.  It can get to the point where we are unable to occupy the present moment at all because of the preoccupation.  This is very spiritually draining. 


Hurry is the issue, not necessarily busyness.  He did warn that busyness can migrate into hurry very easily if we are not careful.


So I guess where I am at with all of this right now is that I am choosing to accept that I will be busy.  The ideal in my mind of not being busy is not realistic.  Living a life that is pursuing mastery does not leave room to not be busy.  The first issue that I need to work on is hurry.  I have been focusing on this for the past few weeks.  Some days I feel like I have made some progress.  I am finding my own panicked self talk to be my biggest enemy - that inner voice that keeps reminding me relentlessly of just how much I should be doing.  I am working on challenging that word should but that just may be a topic for another day.


Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Be present.