Busyness

DearMajor FUN:

I am sitting here in Kennedy Airport, waiting for my flight to Brazil, reading this national magazine. They're saying that the big problem is that people just don't have enough time. That's the big problem, they say. But it's not time that people are running out of. It's fun. And you have to tell them. Please.

-Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi 

Dear National Magazines:

Time is not the problem.

Really. Even when you become painfully aware of how little time there is, and how much time it is taking you, time itself is not the problem.

Busyness is the problem.

Not being busy enough. Being too busy. Any shade of busyness you can think of is the problem.

Busyness is one of those primal problems ground into our very adult and grown-up identities by the way we used to play house and school and now get to do for real.

Remember when you were a kid playing you were not a kid? Remember when you first learned to look busy, and then learned again, and then over and over, since you were a kid growing up, in playground, classroom, office?

Remember how utterly convincingly busy you became?

Well that's the problem. Not time. Not deadlines. It's that we've all become too good at it.

We busy ourselves creating and re-creating daily this state of busyness in every aspect of our relationships, until it becomes almost impossible to let on that we're really only playing, only pretending to be busy, looking like we're busy, convincing ourselves and each other of our busyness because that's the way.

And because we don't want to let on, we tell each other it's all because we don't have enough time.

It isn't. And we all know it has nothing to do at all with time.

Sometimes, I feel I have too much time. So I make myself busy. It's like I have to fool myself into feeling purposeful, so I make myself busy. And even though the purpose I'm filling has nothing to do with any purpose I care about, I'm being busy. I find purpose in my busyness, even where there is none. Especially where there is none.

When I'm between jobs, in fact, that's what I miss the most, almost. Someone to look busy for.

Sometimes, even between jobs, I feel I have too little time. So I make myself busy looking for something to get busy doing.

Oddly enough, you don't really have to be busy. Now that you are an adult, you can stop pretending that you are. Really. You don't have to look busy for anybody anymore. Everybody 10-20 years younger than you believes that you are an adult despite how unbusy you try to look. Now you can look like you're having fun again. Like you looked when you were a child. You can afford to enjoy and to look like you're enjoying.

Because when you are having fun, you are never too busy. Because when you are having fun, you are timeless.