Life can be hectic.  Our modern world is addicted to doing things faster, with implicit impatience woven into our life, the adverts, the devices we use, even how quickly we want to use things.  Our broadband can never be quick enough.  The deliveries from our purchases need to be there in 24 hours or we feel we have been given bad service.  It seeps into communication, the pressure to respond immediately, the insistent chirp of notification acting as a starting gun for the reply.

This busyness is seen as normal.  We charge from one appointment to the next, we fill our days with meetings, appointments, tasks but we rarely make time to just stop, to give ourselves some respite and this is a serious problem.

This was brought home to me recently when I made myself ill through over working.  Over the past few months I saw a steady growth in work requests, and I said yes to them all.  Busyness = money = security.  But before I realised it, I was overloaded.

I could feel it in how quickly I became fatigued, how I was low on energy and motivation and I had cold and flu like symptoms that I couldn’t shake for a few weeks.  But I kept pushing myself, I kept up the high-speed pace of my days. I was being driven by a subtle commentary that I needed to be busy in order to feel like I was working, that I was doing ‘enough’. 

Increasingly I got home exhausted with only the energy to flop on the sofa and watch tv.  I wasn’t doing the activities that balanced my life, that nourished me. Even my meditation practice started to suffer, relegated to a tick-box activity that didn’t really offer me any time out.  My life was too fast, but I normalised it.  Speed, progress and growth are the unwritten signs of success.  Busyness is an unquestioned virtue in our culture but it has to be in balance.  Speed and busyness aren’t indicators that we are doing things right.  Often, we fill time to convince ourselves and others that we are successful, on track professionally and useful.

Soon enough though it felled me.  I was confined to my sick bed; finally undone by the demands I was placing on my constitution.  This forced stillness let me rest, but also allowed me time to read, a task I’d unconsciously let go of in recent weeks to dedicate more time to working.  It made me realise I needed to get back that sense of work-life balance, that I needed to slow down and not sprint through my demands and days.  I made plans for to get back to running, to play my guitar, to read and spend more time doing nothing.  I feel better already!