The Cost of Busyness

Here’s a freebie: when your child leaves a wet towel on the ground, instead of picking it up for her, call her in to stand next to you. Regard the towel together. Then, take a calming breath, and look deep into her eyes and say, “ask me to pick that up for you.” The first time you do this, your child’s eyes will glaze with uncertainty, and if they are wise, perhaps a touch of fear.

The point of this exercise in my home has been to remind my children that even if they don’t explicitly ask me to pick up after them, their actions often dictate that I do. I want them to begin to see themselves as a small piece of a bigger system; what affects one affects the whole. Things left undone by one member of a household (or company, corporation or community) create a quandary for the other members. They too could choose to leave the thing undone, but often at their own expense. Or, they can do the thing, often increasing workload, expectation and resentment.

In the book of common prayer, a beautiful stanza appears that pierces me to the core,

 

“Most merciful God,

we confess that we have sinned against You

in thought, word and deed,

by what we have done,

and by what we have left undone.”

 

I can readily confess the sin I have done. But what about the undone: the people I’ve failed to help, the careless way I spoke to my child, the money I didn’t give and the attention I didn’t share?  As a woman, a mother, a human who just crested my 40^thswing around the sun, this stings. I am aware of my deficiency now in ways I was not pre-children, pre-midlife-mark. I am only recently aware that I am a finite being, with finite energy and finite time.

Of course, I knew these things before in my mind, but now I know them in my body. I feel my joints ache after only an hour or so in the garden. My mental energy is shot after a bad night’s sleep. My temper flares at my husband and children when I realize I cannot do everything or be everything for them or for myself.  If there was a box I could check to ‘do all things’ in a day, surely I would choose it. But now I’m hitting walls I didn’t know existed. As I age, the ceiling draws closer. I am more aware than ever, at the midway point on my hike, the trail I leave behind me is littered with wrappers I haven’t even opened.

I attempt a reckoning with my unfinished business as boldly as I contend with my more obvious brokenness. I evaluate my shortcomings. I do some of the deep, internal work, unseen and unrecognized by the world. I haven’t loved those entrusted to me as I should have. I have wasted time, wasted resources, wasted opportunities. I have left so much to account for. But within the confines of a scheduled packed so tightly it can hardly breathe, I cannot find space for more.

Karl Barth says, “A being is free only when it can determine and limit its activity”. Now my shackles are showing. How busy I am is akin to how free I am. My mind races to catalogue what currently tethers me down and holds me back. It races to file things which were chosen by me and which were forced upon me and which are simply another cog in a system I no longer know how to shut down. An acquaintance passed me on the street the other day, both of us walking briskly past each other, “How are you?” I yelled, no intention to stopping. “Busy, busy!” she yelled back. With mixed feelings I finger my own badge of busyness. I like so much for it to be seen.

A stark, unwelcome thought pierced my brain: what if Jesus was trying to express this tension in His teachings?  Take his gentle words to Mary, the sister of Lazarus, our patron saint of productivity. Take the parable of the wedding banquet: a glorious feast prepared for those too busy to eat it. Take the parable of the good Samaritan: two respected religious leaders hustling past a suffering man. Maybe they even crossed paths, Busy, busy! and a knowing nod.

The believer is often trained to pay attention to WWJD, but less to how He did it. The pace of His life is often my best teacher: Jesus went with whoever asked Him, paused, listened, and responded. He never held a finger up to the suffering. Instead of loaves multiplied or demons driven away or swaths of sick made well, His life was quantified by His availability. His response to the crushing demands of human need was simply, Himself. And He tasked us with the same.

Our unmitigated busyness comes with a price, and not surprisingly, the balance is demanded from those least able to pay: the weak, the vulnerable, the disabled, children, elderly, minorities, women, those who don’t fit in a pre-made box. Societies usually collect payment this way. It’s not the tech companies or banks or CEO’s; almost never the perpetrator who bears the cost. Instead, the balance due trickles down through society until it puddles wet on the bathroom floor.

In our rush and hustle, in our distraction and apathy, in our insistence that we are far too important and busy to stop, a whole world of people fester in their woundedness: ignored children, angry protesters, the elderly languishing in their beds. Last week, I was seated next to a family of four at a restaurant that managed to peruse menus, order, eat and pay all without a single one of them looking up from their personal devices. What are they looking for in there that they cannot find across the table? Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO who pioneered the now-famous ‘our attention spans are shorter than a goldfish’ study concluded that “the true scarce commodity, is human attention.” Time, measured by human attention, is the most expensive thing out there and no one has enough of it.

The price we are collectively paying for this scarcity is much more than the newest time-saving gadget. We thought we’d obtained safety behind gated communities, behind bolted doors, behind the brightly lit anonymity of a screen. The cracks are beginning to show that our quest for safety created a much more dangerous environment. The ignored and outcast, lonely and suffering, are languishing by the side of the road. May we attend to them before they use the barrel of a gun to make themselves heard.

Before we can liberate, we must address our own oppression, removing the cattle prod from our backs and harness from our shoulders. Especially the Christian, who is purposely likened to sheep and not cattle. We have failed to pause. We succumbed to the world’s relentless striving- working even through the seventh day. We have hidden, we have abdicated responsibility, we have been lulled into apathy. We have not shown up as we should. We have so much left undone.

I pray a blessing out of Numbers 6 over my children every night. I lay a hand on their warm, soft heads and I call forth my deepest hopes. I pray over our nation a blessing:

 

May we look the undone in the face.

May we gather the courage to repent.

May Jesus’ reckless availability animate our souls; (or at least let us welcome just one interruption today).

May we wake up,

wake up,

wake up,

before it’s too late.