I haven’t written much recently. I’ve been quite quiet. I’ve been too busy enjoying myself in my new home (more on that to come) and swanning about in the magnificence of a re-opening London. I had dreamed of being back in this city at the point at which restrictions started to ease with the shops, bars and theatres nudging open their doors, dusting down the tables and chairs and blinking excitedly into the early summer daylight and entertaining into the long summer nights. And now here I am! It feels fantastic. So yes, I have been preoccupied with happy living.
The other reason for my quietness is that I haven’t felt like I have had anything interesting to say (I am not one for writing just for the sake of it). This may be because my work has been quieter of late and when I am less pressed for time, my productivity declines and I tend to do less. I have been pondering on this in recent weeks as I have watched my life-long whip cracking self-saboteur come out to play in the corners of my otherwise happy mind. Her voice is familiar, her words over-rehearsed but still penetrating: “You should be busier. Why are you not busier? What’s going wrong?” (the tone escalating into increasingly shrill expressions of accusation and anxiety). If I dig a little deeper, I uncover some enduring beliefs and assumptions about the importance of working hard (by ‘hard’ I mean ‘all the time’), about success being enshrined in ‘uber busyness’ and failure baked into an easeful schedule. Most of you that are self-employed will identify with the “Oh, maybe that last piece of work I did will be the last I ever do” voice which I have certainly learned to live with over the last eight years but which still hilariously pops up and tests my levels of trust in myself and in life from time to time. That has been there too, but the one I have been more curious about is the one that has been shouting “YOU SHOULD BE BUSIER” and seeking to induce panic and self-criticism in the light of too few back-to-back days.
My main reflection on this is that COVID is not the only pandemic around. We have been living with the pandemic of busyness for far longer and there seems to be no vaccination for it, nor even a concern for its impact on our lives nor the degree of coercive control it exercises over us. Some time ago, I wrote a blog entitled “Busy is not a feeling” in response to the most typical answer I was hearing to my question “How are you?”. Busyness seems often to be worn as a badge of honour. What is it about being busy that gives us such a sense of pride and self-worth? Why do so many of us struggle to don the equivalent of a face mask to protect ourselves from its contamination, to distance ourselves from the compulsion of doing and find our personal equivalent of a vaccine in order to ease into a different rhythm or lifestyle? And how busy exactly is busy enough?
In my search for an ‘answer’, I have honed in on the prevailing societal norm of busyness which has wriggled like a parasitic worm into my being. I have asked myself a number of questions in recent weeks and told myself a number of truths, challenging the self-talk I have about being lazy or failing or not earning enough money. None of these are true. What is true is that my work matters a lot to me, that Neon is my creation of which I am very proud, and that I love to feel that I am making some sort of difference by making use of what I have to offer to the world. It is also true that it is not only through my ‘doing’ that I bring all I have to offer to the world, but also through my ‘being’ and my on-going ‘becoming’. I remind myself that it has been a hard year and that, having recently returned to London after four years away, I feel happier and more content than I have for a really long time. I know that this is a form of success that matters deeply to me and that enjoying this period of relative freedom for as long as COVID allows, is utterly aligned to my value of living life as fully as possible. Finally, it is also true that I love and trust Neon and am looking forward to the next ‘wave’ of busyness which, I have no doubt, will come soon enough.
So, tell me! How busy are you? What is driving it? What is your relationship with that busyness? And how busy is busy enough?