The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame by Pete Walker

Author:Pete Walker [Walker, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Azure Coyote Publishing
Published: 2015-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

BUSYHOLISM

All that is hurrying soon will be over with;

only what lasts can bring us to the truth.

Young men, don’t put your trust into the trials of flight,

into the hot and quick.

All things already rest:

darkness and morning light, flower and book.

– Rilke

He who can no longer pause to wonder is as good as dead.

– Albert Einstein

Busyholism is a term I have coined to define the most common and least recognized form of compulsiveness – constant busyness. (According to The Oxford Dictionary, busyness was the original meaning of business!)

“Busyholics” are constantly in action, moving from activity to activity in a never ending quest for “being all they can be.” Similar to workaholics, sometimes workaholic as well, busyholics rarely sit still. They live in the fast lane, compulsively over-scheduling their lives to protect themselves from free time – and the feelings that threaten to emerge when there is a break in their anesthetizing web of constant distraction.

Busyholics are hyperactive caricatures of human beings. At their worst, busyholics are like the nabib lizard, an African desert reptile that survives in scorching sand by constantly and rapidly alternating the feet it stands on.

Not all busyholics are easily recognizable. We do not all travel at warp speed, and some of us manage such a variety of tasks that we appear quite functional, even enviable. Adding variety and number to our repertoire of treadmills however, does not necessarily mean we have withdrawn from the rat race.

I have had busyholic stages in my life in which I tried to simultaneously balance several lifetimes’ worth of activities: jogging to start the day, gardening before breakfast, homework at breakfast, personal phone calls on work breaks, errands for lunch, sports after work, meetings or classes after sports, dates after classes, and several hobbies to fill in those rare unscheduled spaces that invariably made me feel anxious.

At the height of my busyholism, I discovered that if I sprinted home from work and then sprinted back to basketball, I could squeeze in twenty minutes for a “relaxing” meditation! The mere memory of those times makes me feel tired!

Like all compulsives, busyholics are cut off from an unhurried appreciation of the subtle splendors of life. They rarely stop to notice the subtle changes in a garden, to taste the flavors in their food, or to bathe in the color of a friend’s eyes. Let us dethrone the lord of productivity and take inspiration from Richard LeGallienne’s poem:

I meant to do my work today

But a brown bird sang in an apple tree,

And a butterfly flitted across the field

And all the leaves were calling me.

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