It’s been a full week. I have been thinking about how often I feel busy, and have been wondering how to make some changes there. As I have rolled it around in my mind, I have begun to wonder if I am actually busy, or if I just feel busy. Certainly there are times I am doing too much, but I’m starting to wonder how much sway my overall tone has on my experience. How much of the time am I simply holding tension or stress when I don’t actually need to be? Or, let me re-phrase that: how often am I operating in a holding pattern that is no longer real or effective? Am I just behaving busily, even when I’m not?
In “Real Happiness At Work” Sharon mentions the neutral times of day as places that we often check-out/numb-out. I wonder how much of me being “busy” is actually me not being able to settle into the neutral, quiet parts of the day. I read a post from the challenge earlier last week in which the author was talking about the need for quiet moments in the day for us to process what’s happening in our lives (instead of constantly being bombarded with new information from our phones or whatnot). This made a lot of sense to me and I have tried be more mindful of such opportunities to just be and let my mind just gently bop around. I have found when I can relax into full neutral, it’s often very regenerative and calming for me. So, perhaps shifting my overall experience doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to lighten my workload — it just means being able to take a break from the more active parts of the day to let my system reboot a little. My hope is to shift things enough in my day that I will rarely feel the need to answer the question “how are you?” with answer “really busy”!!
I’ll leave you with a photo from the class I taught tonight at BYS working with Mindfulness in the Body. One of the highlights of my week.
-Lily Cushman Frindel
