Aaron Marshall shares:
I may be in the minority, especially in the achievement culture that our country seems to aspire to - but I hate being busy.
There, I said it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love fun activities and I’m overjoyed when I accomplish something I set my mind to. But, I don’t understand when it happened that activities replaced relationships.
Over the past 3 months of quarantine, I’ve felt like my relationships deepened (family and friends alike) and there was an inner peace in the atmosphere.
Before quarantine, there were times that our environment was peaceful, but never for an extended period. On the contrary, at a time when almost everyone I knew was forced to slow down and breathe, we all seemed to get a grip on a perspective that was previously lost on our “pressure-cooked” generation - the simple joy of stillness.
That almost sounds laughable as I write it; I have 3 young boys under 6 years old at home. But yet somehow, our home’s atmosphere was peaceful and joyful. We only had each other and tons of Zoom calls for almost 10 weeks but I felt more connected to our community than in the previous 5 years we’ve lived in South FL. I found myself asking, do activities just keep us busy or are they life-giving in our lives?
Is being “busy” a societal obligation or something we choose for ourselves?
Now I love snowboarding down a double-black diamond through some trees on a beautiful Colorado day, or spending a morning on a boat watching my boys paddle around in the ocean looking for sea creatures, but how much activity is too much? When does it begin to take away from the quiet stillness that I believe our minds crave?
As I move back into a season of perpetual motion and the opportunity to “be still” decreases, I want to be conscious of how much “busy” I let back into my life. If I let “busy” become an obligation again, I hope this time I can recognize and eliminate it before it steals my stillness.
About the Author:
*Aaron Marshall is the Founder of Extra Mile Billing - to connect with him you can email him here.