Tag: Values

The Security Blanket of Busy

Published on by Marilyn18 Comments

stop the glorification of busy

Yesterday I shared a picture on Facebook that garnered a number of responses, and it got me thinking about our addiction to busy.

It works something like this: You run into someone and the conversation goes this way:

Hi! I haven’t seen you in a long time! How have you been?”

“Oh, so busy! Life is just so busy right now”.

“Me as well! I don’t know where the time goes!”.

Happy with our self-congratulations we move on to respective areas of the supermarket.

How often has this happened to you in our western world of quick interactions and fly by conversations?

I posted last year on weather as the great western social facilitator and if weather is one social facilitator in the west, “I’ve been so busy” is another. It has become standard response to the question “How are you?”.

Imagine for a minute that instead of the socially mandated busy one upmanship you respond: “We’ve been great! Not too busy, just the right pace so that we are occupied but not overwhelmed.”

You would have broken a cultural code, for in our society we have created a busy badge of honor worn with pride. We are proud that we are busy. So busy that eating meals together for most families is rare except for Christmas and Thanksgiving. So busy that our counters are cluttered with mail that has not been sorted for 3 months and mold covering what used to be food in plastic containers in our refrigerators could be made into penicillin. The amazing thing is the self-satisfied pleasure with which we let people know this. Like it’s some kind of award or gives us higher status.

Busy has become like a security blanket. We wrap it tightly around us so that we can justify our existence. 

Busy is synonymous with important. If you’re not busy it must mean you aren’t useful. Or important. Or contributing anything worthwhile. Or many other things. Not being busy is a bad thing.

As if adults wearing this blanket of busy with pride is not enough, we’ve passed this cultural value on to our children, the future generation. As they hear us say with fake smiles and little laughs how “busy” we are, they hear the other person respond with affirmation – a “hear, hear” sort of compliment.

Does this busy blanket do anything good for us culturally? Is it a value we want to continue? Is it immigrants working late into the night after finishing their day jobs who claim they are “so busy”. I don’t think so. Those words don’t do them justice.

Many have put the blanket on themselves, a burden that can be blamed on nothing and no one.

Tim Kreider writing an Opinionator piece last year in the NY Times calls this The ‘Busy’ Trap. “It is,” he says “pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint.” His essay is a much more in depth look at this phenomenon and I encourage you to take a look.

So here’s the challenge – Next time someone asks you how you are – don’t do it! Don’t fall for the trap! Use another adjective. Be creative. And once you do – come back to the blog and let us know what you said. How did you respond instead of saying “I’m so busy”?  We need all the help we can get to break this cycle!

What suggestions do you have that can replace the “I’m so busy” mantra? Would love to hear through the comments!

image credit: http://www.positivelypositive.com/2013/01/05/are-you-sooo-busy/

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On Matters of the Heart

Published on by Marilyn11 Comments

One of the fringe benefits of my mom and dad’s move is receiving some gems of books. Some are old favorites, others are brand new. I began reading one of my new treasures this weekend and, as sometimes happens with books, found myself grabbing a pen so I could underline those phrases and paragraphs that put words together in perfect packages, like presents to be unwrapped by my heart and mind.

The book is An Uncommon Correspondence, described as an “East-West Conversation on Friendship, Intimacy and Love”. It is a book that would be deeply appreciated by anyone who has friendships that span cultural boundaries.

It is a series of letters written between Ivy George, a professor who is Indian by birth, but living and working in the United States and Margaret Masson, a third culture kid, also a professor, who is living and working in England. The correspondence spans a one year time period from 1989 to 1990. While the book is primarily about love and relationships, more specifically a look at romantic love versus arranged marriages, it brings up the many cultural trappings that surround those two areas; values, expectations and cultural views integral to how they play out. The result is a unique and readable discourse on the dynamics of love and relationships both sides of the globe.

“How deeply we are written by our culture” exclaims Margaret at one point, as she recognizes that just because she can analyze her reaction to her experiences with romantic love doesn’t mean she is free from falling into the cultural “pitfalls” that are part of the package. And later in the same letter: “It seems that neither of our cultures has got it quite right. But I’m sure that each could learn something from the other. Even if it is simply the acknowledgement, the realization that ours is not the only way, that there are alternatives to what our cultures seem to conspire to convince us is the ‘inevitable’ the ‘natural’.”

Ivy left India to study in the United States, partly to escape the pressure and path to an arranged marriage. But as she observes her peers and others in the United States, the concept of romantic love, carefully cultivated in her life through novels and myth, is shattered, the pieces scattered through stories and on faces of those she meets.In an early letter to Margaret, Ivy says “While I was horrified at my prospects as a married woman in India, I was disappointed at my prospects as a single woman in the U.S” Ivy’s observations of “dating and mating” as she describes it fill her with anxiety and fear. “Alone as I feel” she says “I am still trying to understand ‘loving and losing’ and the worth of it all. The anxieties are deep, the stakes too high. While I came to the West believing in ‘choice’ for one’s life, I am struck by the absence of it. What’s so different from India? Thinking about it as a Christian sheds little further light on this. I can see the workings of God’s grace perhaps, but little perception of God’s will in these matters. There’s far too much human manipulation….”

As far as opinions on physical contact and touch between the sexes, Ivy learns to appreciate more and more some of the traditions she grew up with in India that stress no touch until after marriage. “After living in the west so long I can see the importance of this value in my tradition when I see how many hands, lips, bodies and beds have been shared before one chooses to marry. Surely such serial giving of oneself has an impact on so much of one’s present and future being!”

An area that comes up in the correspondence is close same-sex friendships. Friendships that are not sexual but intimate and life-giving. Both women are concerned that the west has not given enough credence to the importance of intimacy in these friendships. They fear there is no longer any vocabulary for friendships like these in the west; that “all of our longing for intimacy must be focused on a sexual partner”. This is contrasted with the deep and intimate female friendships that Ivy experienced growing up in India.

For as long as I can remember I have analyzed and thought through both eastern and western traditions as they relate to love,marriage and friendship. I have often felt  the west displays a cultural imperialism and ethnocentric attitude toward some of the values and views of the east, namely arranged marriages and the concepts of extended family and their involvement in one’s life. This book was freeing and I found myself nodding and speaking to it, like I would to a person; it gives words to so much of what I have thought, seen and felt.

Full of insight, wisdom and some humorous moments, this book challenged me to think further and farther about love, marriage, intimacy and friendship across oceans and cultures. Is it that there is something better than what both sides of the globe present? Can those of us who want to seek a better way; an attitude that transcends both cultures? As Margaret says in the introduction, being offered a different perspective can be disturbing. And it can also be “profoundly liberating”.

What do you think?

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When Time is Currency

Published on by Marilyn7 Comments

A new film was released this weekend called “In Time“.  To summarize the plot, everyone on earth is given a year to live at the age of 25. As soon as a child is born they have a clock embedded in their arm. At the age of 25 the clock begins ticking. The poor try to barter, trade, and steal more time. The rich have all the time in the world. Time is the currency. A cup of coffee? Four minutes. A beer? 7 minutes. There is a ghetto where people lose time and die young, and there is a “Beverly Hills” where people have all the time in the world. At 25 people stop aging, so a rich person can be 110 years old, but they look 25.

Into this scenario comes our protagonist, Will Salas, played by Justin Timberlake. Will has seen too many people die in his short life. When the clock stops ticking, no matter where a person is, they fall over dead. There is a desperation present in people as they guard their time, continually watching their clocks. Into this world of hopelessness and desperation comes a man who is 105 and still has centuries on his clock. This man wants to die.  “The day comes when you’ve had enough. Your mind can be spent even if your body’s not.” he tells Will. While Will is sleeping, the man transfers his time to Will and his life ends, even as Will wakes up to centuries of time.

As the plot unfolds, the viewer realizes that there is plenty of time for everyone, that no one has to die before their time. But time is controlled by the wealthy, held in large steel vaults lest it fall into the wrong hands.  “For a few to be immortal, many must die” is the quote of the movie.

The movie gives a new meaning to the term “premature death”. It also gives a new meaning to the quest for eternal youth, and the selfishness that comes with too much of anything, whether it be the currency of time or the currency of money.

Watching this film in today’s context is fascinating. In the movie the poor die young, and the rich live forever. In our world, we know through the social determinants of health, that the poor do die young, and the life span of the rich is significantly longer. Viewed through a spiritual lens, the movie holds even more meaning and makes me ask “What is my currency? What do I perceive as valuable? What do I hold onto with a vengeance, not wanting to let go or let it fall into other hands?”

How would you live if time was your currency?  Better still, what is your currency? It’s a reflective question on a Monday morning – if you have time think about it!

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