My mother used to say, “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.” The ironic premise accorded them almost super-human powers.
I have never been a fan of hustle culture and the burnout of competing to be the busiest and most sleep deprived. But a recent shift has me reflecting on the lessons to be learned from busyness.
Periods of my life have been more or less spacious, more or less hectic. For many years now I have worked from home, which feels more spacious even when there is lots to be done. It allows me to eat when I’m hungry and sleep when I’m tired, for the most part—something I wish were more universal.
Recently, however, I took on a third job, a contract that has me up before dawn every morning and out the door to perform a demanding assignment, in addition to the work I was doing already. I am far from the most overworked person in the world, but it has been an adjustment, with a learning curve and new insights.
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As a young adult, I was not a model of industry. I was the college student with this quote from Gertrude Stein pinned to my corkboard: “It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.” After the teenage years of being prodded by my father to amend a tendency to overanalyze—“Don’t think, do!” he would say—I loved discovering that there were essays by great thinkers lauding boredom and books such as “Éloge de la paresse” praising laziness as a source of creativity and happiness. I liked the swoony sensuality of lying in the sun for hours and long hot baths. I happily contemplated incense curling up to the ceiling in my bedroom.
We can blame some of this on dear Sister Patricia, the English teacher at my Catholic high school. In her Great Books class, we read The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I adored and took to be not a morality tale, but a guidebook. Perfume and tapestries, art and music, oh my! Shortly afterwards, I informed Dad that I was a hedonist—a moral hedonist, of course. (Can you imagine hearing this from your teenage daughter?) He tried earnestly to convince me that this was not a worthy philosophy upon which to base a life.
Although, come to think of it, he was the one who let me read, when I was only 11, an old beat-up copy of Bonjour Tristesse I found on the bookshelf of an otherwise empty house we moved into. Like a fateful talisman, that adolescent ode to languid, libertine days on the French Riviera planted early seeds in my impressionable spirit.
Eventually, I would want certain things enough to work hard for them, and ambition would prevail over artful laziness. When I moved to Brooklyn, my first job took me away from home 13 hours a day, between working and commuting. I would take the subway into Grand Central Station where I would catch a regional train to Connecticut, work all day, and then do the reverse in the evening. I was younger then and had the stamina for it.
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Revisiting strenuous busyness as an older person, no longer possessed of boundless energy, has shown me the toll it takes but also some of the wisdom it bestows. For example:
Perfection is overrated. There is no time to give that email a fourth, or even second, look. If there is a typo, the reader will forgive me. Yes, even though one of my jobs is editing.
Every dinner does not have to be a feast. My partner has probably always cared less about this than I do. And he would doubtless prefer to eat a simple meal with a less ragged and impatient companion.
Constraint can spur creativity, on the dinner table and elsewhere, as we figure out the puzzle of the 24 hours in a day.
We are stronger than we think, and physical and mental fatigue are different beasts. I can be mentally exhausted—the kind of tired when my eyes are watery and twitchy and I wonder if I’m going to have a migraine—and still swim laps, which is important to me and makes my body feel good. It requires energy from a different well.
The limits on emotional bandwidth can be a blessing. I am less obsessive these days about small slights, disappointments and embarrassments. There is no time to dwell on them, to argue with someone in my head all afternoon. I feel them and then they are left behind in the forward rush. The more moving parts in a life, the less space each part can occupy—and dead weight is jettisoned.
I am also less easily offended. Those friends who don’t respond to texts or return phone calls? I used to think, “How long would it take?” and maybe get miffed. Now I am more compassionate. We are all just trying to maintain our sanity and there truly are not enough hours in the day.
I look forward to having more time for the slow pleasures I love when this time-management boot camp is over, but I wonder if it will have molded me into a different shape by then. Having been pushed closer to my limits, I have discovered the gap in myself between where I am now and where I was before. It might not close up, entirely—especially if I fill it with new meaning.
Music: "Time" by Pink Floyd
