Often, when someone asks me how I’ve been, I respond, “Busy. I feel like I can hardly catch my breath!” Frequently, when I give this response, I can’t even pinpoint what activities have been blocking out my calendar—I just know that time seems to dissolve faster than an ice cube on a summer day. And after I say this, my conversational partner will nod in agreement. They’re busy, too.
At the end of a long day, I relish the opportunity to survey the checkmarks next to items on my to-do list. A good day—I’m often tempted to think—is a day when I’ve checked off most or all of those items. I’ve gotten a lot done. I’ve contributed. My day had value.
To be sure, family, career, and general household management can blacken the pages of a planner very quickly. Attending with care to all our responsibilities takes a lot of time, if done well. But we can easily slip into viewing busyness as an end in itself, and, subconsciously, consider a lack of constant, frenetic activity as an inferior lifestyle.
Yet it puts us at risk of losing sight of the value of inactivity. Sometimes a cultural emphasis—such as productivity and proactivity—can begin to weigh too heavily on one side of the scale of life, causing an imbalance. Modern life moves swiftly. Societal pressures push us toward having more accomplishments on our résumé, a higher paycheck, and a bigger office, while our children and grandchildren engage in more extracurricular activities.
All this befuddles the mind. It can cause us to place our identity and worth in what we do—how many boxes we check—rather than in who we are or in the more intangible achievements of charity, wisdom, compassion, and others.
Value Over Busyness
In his book “Prudence,“ Friar Gregory Pine wrote, ”Many of us set aside the work of truly being happy, and instead content ourselves with simply being busy.”Pine’s startling words pull us up short. Is it possible that in the midst of a booked schedule, we forget to ask, What is all this busyness for? Is it fostering true and lasting happiness? Is it meaningful? Often, of course, it is. That’s a victory. But sometimes it isn’t, and the quiet voice inside that asks such questions gets drowned out in the cacophony of a hectic day, the interminable string of tasks that spill out of our commitments, the breathless rush to “get things done.”
“There are, indeed, some legitimately and inescapably busy people in the world; but there are also quite a few of us who just choose to be so, who fill our lives with activity of whatever sort. … Why is this the case? There are any number of reasons for why we overcommit. ... Whatever the reason we give, though, the source of our frenzied activity probably runs deeper. Many of us, I suspect, take on so much because we feel like we need to in order to justify our existence.”Such a need grows naturally when surrounded by a culture that—for good reason—values the accomplishment of concrete tasks. But that mentality conceals certain dangers. What about the people in our society who are unable to be productive in the typical sense of the term? What about the paralyzed person who is confined to his or her home? What about the mentally handicapped individual who can’t “contribute to society” in the normal manner? Do they, then, have no value?
Certainly, they do have value, even if those who are hyper-focused on busyness and productivity fail to recognize it. A homebound person can engage in some of the most important human activities, yet without being busy or productive in the narrow sense. That person can still practice virtue, deepen his or her mind, create art, comfort others, offer prayers, and contemplate reality.
For the ancient philosopher Aristotle, human beings’ distinctive function was rationality, the ability to know and choose. The possession of those powers (even if only in potential) is one of the things that gives every human being inherent value. Our value rests in who we are, not just what we do.
“The ancients conceived the whole energy of human nature as a hunger. Hunger for what? For being, for undiminished actuality, for complete realization—which is not attainable in the subject’s isolated existence, for it can be secured only by taking into the self the universal reality.”
In other words, the human soul finds completion in union with reality itself. How does that union take place? Through contemplation, which can be defined as knowing and loving reality. Pieper wrote that through contemplation, “the objective world, in so far as it is known, is incorporated into the very being of the knower.”
Western philosophers—including Pieper—go so far as to argue that true happiness consists in this contemplation. Specifically, happiness comes from contemplating what we love. Contemplation allows us to possess what we love because knowing something is the deepest form of possessing it. As Pieper put it, “Love, then, is necessary for happiness; but it is not enough. Only the presence of what is loved makes us happy, and that presence is actualized by the power of cognition.” When we’re in the presence of the beloved, we’re happy.
The process begins, according to Pieper, through the “silent perception of reality.” The key word here is “silent.” Which is to say that, sometimes we need peace and quiet—inactivity—in order to better know and love the world.
We don’t always need to be busy. Sometimes we just need to be.
