The \u201cBusy\u201d Trap,<\/em><\/strong> dwells upon his opinions on busyness.\u00a0 He believes that busyness is an addiction, is a coping mechanism to help people not have to face what might just be there when they have nothing to do. \u00a0Kreider talks about two of his friends, two completely different circumstances.\u00a0 One of his friends is too busy to notice that an invitation to spend time together is such.\u00a0 His other friend has left behind a very busy world to one more relaxed and calming, only to find what she thought was her personality was a side effect of the stress of being busy.<\/p>\nI believe busyness drains us of who we are to give us false personalities and lives filled with self-obtained stress. \u00a0\u00a0I agree wholeheartedly we as people, as a human race, tend to fill our life with a void of nothingness disguised as fulfillment.<\/p>\n
I believe that to be busy fills life with a certain nothingness, a daily rush to do everything you possibly can, only to be rewarded with the stress that it gives back to you. \u00a0I do not think there is any value in stuffing the day with activities.<\/p>\n
Kreider says, \u201cEven children are busy now, scheduled down to the half hour with classes and extracurricular activities<\/em>\u201d (381). \u00a0This is true.\u00a0 There is a woman who lives in my neighborhood, I babysit her youngest child, she goes to dance, gymnastics, yoga, a math tutor, she eats dinner, has thirty minutes of reading time, and then it is bed time. \u00a0My family never did this, we never could have \u2013 we lived out of town.\u00a0 My \u2018extracurricular\u2019 was running around the woods getting poison ivy and chasing after chickens until my mother called me in for dinner. \u00a0Now I would like to believe this is just as important as learning a new language, or perfecting your times table because I learned a lot while doing all of these things\u2026 how to differentiate between leaves and the importance of being gentle. \u00a0Do people not see the fundamental mistake they have made in giving children so much to do?\u00a0 We have given them no time to find out who they are and no time to explore the world around them. \u00a0If a child never has time to just be, and by that I mean have no activities they must go to and no responsibilities, then how are they ever to learn to enjoy themselves, learn to just be? \u00a0In filling a child’s life with seven different things every day of the week we are teaching them that they must always have something to do, for if they do not have something, some activity or class to do, they are not doing anything of importance, so they are no longer important\u2026<\/p>\nHuman beings tend to feel the need to feel important. \u00a0To feel as if they are somehow doing something of great importance. \u00a0When the matter of the fact is that in two hundred, three hundred, four hundred years for now no one is going to know your name or that you worked three hours of overtime on Thursday.\u00a0 There will be no shadow of a thought about ordinary people and their ordinary lives. \u00a0When someone is lying on their deathbed I sincerely doubt that they will be thinking, \u201cOh god I should have worked more.<\/em>\u201d \u00a0They will be thinking, \u201cIf only I could enjoy the sun one last time, kiss Mary goodbye, and have held my children a bit longer<\/em>\u201d(384). \u00a0Kreider said something similar to that.<\/p>\nI have always been like water. \u00a0I float along with the plan. \u00a0I can change without resistance.\u00a0 If they need twenty minutes, I can sit in the sun and enjoy the breeze. \u00a0I feel no need to throw myself into a tizzy because my perfect to the second schedule has been thrown to space. \u00a0I have often thought on the subject of last thoughts, I have wondered what mine will be, what regrets I will have, what are the things I will truly miss at the end of it all\u2026 \u00a0Most likely the things that cannot be replaced, interaction with a certain human being, and their idiosyncrasies. \u00a0It seems to me that people have forgotten how to stop, take a moment, how to think about everything that is around them without thinking about what needs to be done. \u00a0If one cannot take a single moment to breath, to stop and look at the sky and realize its crisp blue beauty, does it still exist in their world, or has it simply disappeared, maybe it has become the forgotten background to an ever bleak and monotonous existence?\u00a0\u00a0 What is the point in being alive if one cannot enjoy the things that are around them every day, the spectacular display that seems to go unnoticed, washed out in a rainstorm of \u2018productivity\u2019?<\/p>\n
Despite my opinions, busyness can also be an important escape from something a person needs to stop and face. \u00a0If I keep busy, that dark shadow cannot catch up to me, it cannot get me. \u00a0I know this all too well.\u00a0 When I was younger I had something terrible happen to me and instead of facing it, instead of talking about it, I took up running.\u00a0 Quite literally.\u00a0 I would run and run trying to get away, I would run until I threw up. \u00a0Honestly I think that in that time, that is what I needed. \u00a0Busyness is okay sometimes \u2013 it is an escape, but a necessary one. \u00a0Victims of trauma and assault often take up a hobby \u2013 piano, reading, binge watching all of a television show just so they do not have to face the dark, so that they do not have to face what has happened to them. \u00a0I have been there, I have seen that side of the world, and I think it is an important argument, but eventually you will run out of places to run, shows to watch, books to read, and you will be alone, left to face what happened.<\/p>\n
There will always be two sides to a single coin, always people on different sides of the fence. \u00a0If we flip over said fence there will be people who believe being busy is a good thing, and they are entitled to that opinion, just as I am entitled to my own. \u00a0One reason someone might say keeping your children busy is a great thing to do, is that it keeps them out of trouble. \u00a0There are countless youth groups dedicated just to keeping kids away from drugs, which must mean that plenty of people go to them, because how would they stay open if people did not? \u00a0I am positive plenty of people enjoy them as well. \u00a0Here is the argument in a whole: If a child has countless activities or clubs to go to, they will have no time to act out, they will have no time to experiment with drugs or commit crimes. \u00a0I can agree it is a good thing to keep the world’s youth safe from the dangers that hide around the corner. \u00a0But I can also argue that it is not a good thing to keep children and teenagers so busy they never know about the hard parts of life, because they will then be left with a blank mind that doesn\u2019t know what to do when someone approaches them with these options they have never had to face.<\/p>\n
Another argument for keeping busy with work and overtime and volunteering is that it builds character. \u00a0When a person works hard they are a hard worker.\u00a0 Simple, right? \u00a0And since everyone loves a hard worker, employers are more likely to hire a hard worker who is well rounded and takes on just enough extra work and overtime, not too much because that will interfere with their busyness at work. \u00a0Everything is a well calculated move, life becomes like a well-oiled machine.\u00a0 Everyone is a perfectly fitting cog when they are busy, and if they are not busy they are sure the machine will fall to pieces. \u00a0But that is not true.\u00a0 As Kreider says about his friend who left her busy New York life for one the French countryside, \u201cShe still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain.<\/em>\u201d (382).\u00a0 This woman does not let work fill her entire day and that is just fine, she still gets everything she needs done and also has time to spend with friends, she no longer lets the curse of busy cover her in a dark mist. And that well-oiled machine?\u00a0 Well it looks to me like it did not fall apart.<\/p>\nNo matter where people go in life there will always be pros and cons of being busy.\u00a0 There will always be two sides of the fence, one seemingly greener than the other depending on the light in which you are looking at it. \u00a0I believe there is nothing more important than to be free to hold onto every moment of your life.\u00a0 Every single second the clock ticks down another stroke, every grain of sand in that hourglass of our lifetimes. \u00a0We do not know how much time we have, how many grains of sand, I could live to be eighty years old, or just barely make it to my twenties. \u00a0So I am determined to spend my time doing what pleases me, take naps in the glow of the warm sun, walk slowly in the cool fall air, do whatever it takes to make me feel fulfilled.<\/p>\n
I slept in the other day, something I almost never do.\u00a0 Something engrained into my mind made me say to my mother, \u201cBeing lazy.<\/em>\u201d \u00a0To which she replied, \u201cRelaxing is just as important as getting things done.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 I believe that busyness is an escape from yourself, it is a way of tiptoeing the tightrope over the abyss of self-awareness.\u00a0 The only way people will ever be able to take the plunge, to let go and fall back into themselves, is to take a moment and realize it is okay to just be.<\/p>\n{P.S. You can find more of Julia here<\/a>.}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"True wisdom is ageless understanding. My daughter Julia, @Chibichiree, wrote this essay for school.\u00a0 She is seventeen. If I Had a Nickel for Every Time I was Busy\u2026 Tim Kreider\u2019s, The \u201cBusy\u201d Trap, dwells upon his opinions on busyness.\u00a0 He believes that busyness is an addiction, is a coping mechanism to help people not have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[67],"class_list":["post-5379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-julia","tag-busyness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cgayling.com\/malmaxa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}