Beneath the Skyline

The Ennobling of “Busy”

Deborah Good

“Michael,” I began my email to this magazine’s editor, “Somehow, writing a column for this issue of Dreamseeker has continually fallen off my radar for the past several weeks. I guess I am trying to fit too much into this one little life of mine.”

I have a dual personality. The first values slowness. It values being. Under its guise, I dream up unlikely scenarios that involve moving to a falling-down house in a quiet, small town, where I will spend my days reading, writing, learning carpentry, and taking long breaks to share tea or beer on the porch with friends.

Meanwhile, the second personality wants to do everything and connect with everyone. For most of my life, with only a few exceptions, this personality has reigned supreme. It has me juggling jobs, creating and taking on additional out-of-work projects, squeezing in coffee with a friend before a meeting and a soccer game, and then going to a party afterward, all the while jotting to-do lists in the margins of my notebook and letting the laundry pile up until I have run out of clean underwear.

I live a full life. The variety of activities and people that make up my days keep me interested in this great project called living, like a curious child, skipping from one play corner to the next, constantly active, learning, and changing. I rarely feel bored or stagnant, and I sometimes feel quite bubbled-over and happy. But much of the time, I feel overextended, a little chaotic, and, well, pretty tired.

I am coming to terms with a difficult reality: By doing the many things I like, I have created a life that I don’t. Not as much as I want to, anyway. Not enough.

In college, two friends and I decided to take a semester off and drive East-Coast-to-West-Coast. We spent three months following our maps and rather-elastic plans, visiting friends, hiking and camping, and—as long as we were eating and sleeping in relative safety—generally unconcerned with time and productivity. I took my watch off before we left the East Coast. I have not put it on since.

Time and I have a rather contentious relationship. I try to be present in the moment, but even in my watch-less state, I regularly pull out my cell phone to check when I need to be where. Because I am so often trying to use every last minute of every 60-minute hour, my friends now know to expect my phone call or text: Running a little late. On my way now.

And amid all my running around, I have a tendency to leave things behind. This has, apparently, been a life-long habit. When I was in elementary school, I forgot this or that piece of clothing so often, Mom decided to buy my clothes mostly from thrift stores so she didn’t have to dig through the lost and found for something more valuable.

Life-long habits are hard to break. I, however, am going to try—an endeavor that sends me down yet another path with no clear answers and an undetermined destination. How will I compose a life that feels more sane and balanced? Here I share some of the experiments I am trying, and lessons I’m (maybe) learning along the way.

Daily and yearly, I live aware of the tension between my two personalities. The first one, which longs for simplicity and wide-open, unoccupied time, battles it out with the second, the do-do-doer, which wants exactly the opposite.

The second one is winning not because she is right but because she gets far more approval from the big world of approval-givers. We ennoble being busy. I get affirmation from a variety of people in my life for doing a lot. It is not uncommon that I ask the how-are-you question and get “I’m busy” in response, to which I respond, “Me, too. Me, too.”

Suddenly, it feels like we are kneeling down with sarcastic bows to one another. “Wow, busy, huh? That must be rough, but boy are we honorable for being so busy.” I catch myself thinking that a busy life is somehow worth more, but I am pretty sure this is not true.

Today, in between things, I stopped by to see Dee Dee, a poet friend who juggles at least as much as I do and two kids in addition. I do not see her often enough and this time had only 45 minutes before I would have to leave. In her kitchen, we loaded an empty milk crate with tea, mugs, honey, and snacks, and then went out into her yard. Together we hoisted the crate and two plastic chairs up into a tree house, and clambered up ourselves, creating a little retreat space beneath the leaf canopy, while her kids played below.

This brief time together had a different quality than the 45 minutes of my life that passed before and immediately after our tree-house convening. While the time with Dee Dee was in many ways too short, it was also expansive. It could not be valued in terms of our productivity (indeed we consumed tea and chocolate-covered almonds more than we produced anything tangible), yet the moments were immeasurably valuable.

Perhaps this is what some people call kairos, a concept of time very different from the sequential, minute-counting chronos time we know best. From what I understand, kairos refers to openings in time, opportune moments that have a timeless quality to them, moments when we are present, pay good attention, and recognize that this whole time thing is a human creation and obsession after all.

Chances are, I will never fully escape chronos time. Part of the answer, then, is learning to manage it more thoughtfully. This, I admit, is not my strong suit. I sometimes feel like a choir director whose singers have decided to disregard my lead, while I try to rein them back into singing the right notes and tempo. (In this metaphor, my anarchic singers are my time, my to do list, my scheduled and unscheduled activities.)

A friend returned from a seminar on time management saying that we should sort the many things we want and need to do in our lives into categories A, B, and C. Category A, he tells me, are the most important things in life, those things we want to say we have done when we are on our death beds.

Ironically, these are usually the things that no one is really counting on us to do, so we always put them off for later while we tend to category B tasks, which have consequences because they are tracked carefully by others (e.g. paying the mortgage), and category C tasks, which we must do even if no one is really paying attention (e.g. taking out the trash). To create a meaningful life, according to the seminar, our goal should be to structure our lives in a way that allows us to take care of B and C tasks expeditiously, leaving time and energy for category A.

This reminds me of a story that was being forwarded around and landed in my inbox several years ago. In it, a professor stands before his class with an empty mayonnaise jar. He fills it with golf balls and asks the class if the jar looks full. After they have said yes, he pours in a collection of pebbles, which fill the spaces between the golf balls. They agree again that the jar is full. Next he repeats the drill with sand. By this point, the students are laughing.

“Now,” said the professor, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life.” He explains that the golf balls are the important things (the category A things)—your health, your family and friends, your passions. The pebbles are other things that matter. And the sand, he said, “is everything else—the small stuff.”

“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls.”

Two weeks ago, I wrote a letter to my supervisor and last week sat down with the executive director of the small nonprofit where I work. To my surprise and what actually feels like great relief, she approved my request for four-fifths time. The new schedule will come with some consequences—cutting my salary and benefits by 20-percent, for two—but I stand solidly by my decision.

This is my newest experiment in making my life more sane and balanced. By working at this now-full-time job only four days a week, I hope to have more time left in my mayonnaise jar for the golf balls.
—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a research assistant at Research for Action (www.researchforaction.org) and author, with Nelson Good, of Long After I’m Gone: A Father Daughter Memoir (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2009). Send your strategies for composing a sane and balanced life to deborahagood@gmail.com.