Busy

Frequently, I have a few students who come to me to tell my how busy they are. They come with complicated tales of how life is impinging on them in complex ways that prohibits them from doing whatever it is I am requiring of them, even to the point of not making it to class. For a few, after hearing their woes, which are truly woes, I suggest that maybe this is not the time to be in school. College can wait until things become less complicated. But for most, their stories represent an inability to manage routine events of life, and the caution becomes “everybody I know is busy.” It is not a cliché, people everywhere I look seem to be in a dead run to somewhere else. I admire people who are able to saunter (saute as a friend says) through the day, head up, alert on their surroundings. All too often I am, head down, fast paced, focused, must get through this with teeth clenched. Now to my defense, what I am doing is probably not all that important, but more likely to be forgotten if I don’t approach it purposefully. Or so I believe.

found these bees this past summer. They were doing bee stuff. They were busy. It’s pretty much life or death stuff they were about. They were so busy they never noticed me. I wasn’t using my freakishly amazing zoom on my camera, I was that close to them. How often do we miss things, that close to us, because we are busy? Big or small, the features of the world are missed when I have my head down. I miss offering a reassuring hug, a gesture of greeting, a desperate need. And so what if I forget, maybe being busy-less is better than busy-ness.