Busyness

Everyday is busy. Just busyness. There is something, anything that will expand to fill the time that you have available. I have to go to my office each morning, fire up my computer and prepare for my morning classes. I have to make sure content that is required is available on line, that my notes for the days lecture are prepared and that I have taken care of issues that may have occurred since the last class meeting. Additionally, I have to double check on classes that are taught fully on line, answer questions that may have arisen, grade any work that had been turn in during the evening. And then I go to class. During a typical day, I give my students a test over the last chapter covered and then lecture on the next chapter. I then call roll, by asking a thought provoking question, and class is dismissed. I return to my office and prepare to do this again, sometimes five time during the course of the day.

Additionally, my office is on the third floor of a building with a precarious elevator. So I take the stairs, not only as practicality, but its good exercise. And I do them about five times over the course of a single day (making my 10,000 daily steps is usually a breeze). Not only do I teach classes, run up and down the stairs, I then have to answer questions, emails, telephone calls, fill out paperwork and attend committee meetings. It is quite easy to get caught up in the busyness of each and every single day. It becomes easy to forget that at the heart of all of this is the effort to educate adults so that they will not only be better citizens but earn a living wage.

I suspect that it is easy for all of us to get caught up in the busyness of life. To allow the purpose of it all to get caught up in the doing of it all, so caught up that it becomes lost. And I think this is how we find thin places when we are away from the busyness, and struggle to find it when we are in the midst of our routine.

Something I am trying to pay close attention to is where the thin places are in all the busyness.