Not On My Time: A Closer Look At Being Busy
I have distinct memories of it from my early days of school: sitting at my desk, watching the seconds tick by on the clock as I scribbled my way through a fat stack of worksheets. Sometimes they were colouring pages, sometimes they were word searches, and sometimes they were connect-the-dots. If you think hard about these kinds of activities, there’s a nugget of learning in them somewhere. Maybe they enhanced fine motor skills, or added a few new words to one’s vocabulary, or they could have added just a molecule or two of creativity to class time. But let’s be honest, they were mostly just ways to keep a kid seated and quiet until dismissal time, under the guise of keeping said kid safe and out of trouble.
This was busywork.
I hate busywork. Always have, always will. And alas, ours is an era replete with it. There are three parts to busy work:
1. It keeps someone occupied.
2. It passes the time.
3. It is given and executed with little to no explanation of why it needs to be done.
I can live with the first two aspects. Humans do like to be busy. Being busy might even be a vital part of what we are. And I’d never want to dismiss the ennui attached to the passage of time. I feel that too. It’s the last point that incurs my wrath.
As a kid, I didn’t have the vocabulary or the guts to ask why I was being made to go through the motions like this at school. Even if I had been savvy enough to ask about the objectives and the benefits of running a crayon through a maze, or cutting out endless circles of paper, I probably would have been shut down pretty quickly. As an adult who’s been in front of a classroom, I can appreciate a teacher needing a minute or two to catch their breath, and the simple relief of being able to pass out photocopies of something.
But I’m not a kid anymore, and although I now relish the occasional opportunity to switch off, busy work isn’t good enough anymore. And it seems to make up a huge portion of adult lives.
Think of all the things we do on a daily basis that have little to no reason behind them. Some of them are harmless, I guess. Some may be quasi-therapeutic, a way to quiet the noise or let off some steam. But there are others, a lot of them, that are tantamount to being handed another fat stack of worksheets, being told to avoid being a nuisance. This could include:
Battering our bodies to look a certain way that does not, let’s be honest, have anything to do with actually being well.
Priding ourselves on “hauls”, piles of merchandise that we neither want nor need nor feel any particular connection to.
Consenting to being made ill, over and over again, for the sake of convenience and efficiency.
Consuming hours and hours of virtual nonsense that is neither accurate nor useful, dulling our responses to tragedies that should be calls to arms.
Bottling up any interest or talent that isn’t profitable or that might distinguish us.
Joining in hate fests for random pockets of the population whose existence really has no meaningful negative impact on our own.
Driving this, eating that, living here or there, sleeping then (or not at all), and following any path simply because “That’s just how it’s done”.
When (and if) there is intentionality behind these things, it’s usually someone else’s. Someone else benefits from you toiling away without raising your hand to ask for justification. Someone else is telling you how to scratch the itch of wanting to feel accomplished. “Someone Else” can be so enormous and impersonal that they don’t even know you exist. One can, and many people do, fill an entire lifetime being someone else’s version of busy.
Doing things with intention and purpose, namely, our own intention and purpose, is hard. It’s uncomfortable. It takes time and perseverance. It means we might have to change our minds about things, probably on an ongoing basis. When the frantic running around stops, we’re left alone with our thoughts, and that can be terrifying. But if it bothered us as kids to be told to sit and dig through piles of meaningless tasks, it should bother us that we’re doing it again as adults. We’re doing it a lot. It might be all we’re doing.
Cutting out the busy work is as easy and wonderful, and as difficult and uncomfortable as just asking ourselves for a “Why?”, at least when it really counts. Being purposeful and intentional doesn’t mean we’ll end up famous, wealthy, powerful, or even blissfully happy, but then again, those too are targets we’ve been handed by others, often with nefarious plans for the fruits of our labour. Living in the time and place we are now, there are still dots to connect, words to search for, mazes to navigate, shapes to sort out, and so many ways to colour, especially outside of the lines. And none of these require us to stay seated or keep quiet.