Quotes for the Journey: Busyness Who remembers when we used to rest on Sunday instead of Monday? Kin Hubbard

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve.  We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.       -Mark Twain     The really idle person gets nowhere.  The perpetually busy person does not get much further.       -Heneage Ogilvie     If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle--absolute busyness--then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy--and without consciousness.       -Gunther Grass     A lot of our 'busyness' is a way for us to avoid thinking about what is most important.  There's a difference between being busy and being productive.        -Kristen Lippincott     Life lived amidst tension and busyness needs leisure.   Leisure that recreates and renews.  Leisure should be a time to think new thoughts, not ponder old ills.       -C. Neil Strait      Being busy does not always mean real work.  The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration.  Seeming to do is not doing.      -Thomas Alva Edison

May I never get too busy in my own affairs that I fail to respond to the needs of others with kindness and compassion.       -Thomas Jefferson

The world is full of men and women who work too much, sleep too little, hardly ever exercise, eat poorly, and are always struggling or failing to find adequate time with their families.  We are in a perpetual hurry--constantly rushing from one activity to another, with little understanding of where all this activity is leading us. . . . The world has gone and got itself in an awful rush, to whose benefit I do not know.  We are too busy for our own good.  We need to slow down.  Our lifestyles are destroying us. The worst part is, we are rushing east in search of a sunset.       -Matthew Kelly

Modern people are frantically trying to earn enough to buy things they're too busy to enjoy.     -Frank A. Clark

If you are too busy to develop your talents, you are too busy.       -Julia Cameron

Rabindranath Tagore writes that the song he wanted to sing has never happened because he spent his days “stringing and unstringing” his instrument.  Whenever I read these lines a certain sadness enters my soul.  I get so preoccupied with the details and pressure of my schedule, with the hurry and worry of life, that I miss the song of goodness which is waiting to be sung through me.      -Joyce Rupp

We may dream of a time when we can lie down beneath the night sky and do nothing but be present in its vastness with total attention.  But our dreams are too often sabotaged by the busyness generated by anxiety.  We seek evidence of our worth through what we produce, become, and surround ourselves with.  Boredom has come to be regarded as one of our greatest enemies and we flee from it by generating endless complexity and busyness.  Boredom may be no more than a surrender of sensitivity, yet, rather than turning our hearts and minds to rediscover that lost sensitivity, we thirst for even more exciting experiences, drama, and intensity. . . When alienated from inner vitality we mistake intensity for wakefulness.       -Christina Feldman

They who are too busy doing good find no time to be good.       -Rabindranath Tagore

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of contemporary violence.  To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.      -Thomas Merton

Busyness is something that keeps us away from quiet time, from meditation, from friends and family, from reading, from relaxation.  And these are the things that help us to re-create ourselves, to rejuvenate ourselves, and to grow and develop as human beings.  Making the decision to step away from being busy can help us in many different ways, some of which are completely unimaginable to us while we're still busy, while we're still so scattered in our thoughts that we can't focus on anything else but the immediate task at hand.  We owe it to ourselves to take care of ourselves, and being perpetually busy is neither healthy n or wise for the vast majority of us.      -Tom Walsh

Somewhere in the late 20th century we got the idea that busyness is a virtue.  We decided that the more activities we can squeeze into our lives, the happier we'll be.  What ultimately results, though, is physical and spiritual exhaustion.  We jump from one appointment to another, our body and mind racing. We schedule events back to back and overlapping, with no time to rest or reflect.  And when we're in one activity, we're either distracted with the thing we've just done or the thing that's coming up.  It's not a good way to live.      -Jack Zavada

Don't be too busy earning a living to make any money.       -Joe Karbo

A few years ago, on a liner bound for Europe, I was browsing in the library when I came across a puzzling line by Robert Louis Stevenson:  "Extreme busyness, whether at school, kirk, or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality."  Surely, I thought, "deficient" is a mistake--he must have meant "abundant."  But R.L.S. went merrily on, "It is no good speaking to such folk:  they can not be idle, their nature is not generous enough."   Was it possible that a bustling display of energy might only be a camouflage for a spiritual vacuum?  The thought so impressed me that I mentioned it next day to the French purser, at whose table I was sitting.  He nodded his agreement.  "Stevenson is right," he said.  "Indeed, if you will pardon my saying so, the idea applies particularly to you Americans.  A lot of your countrymen keep so busy getting things done that they reach the end of their lives without ever having lived at all."       -Arthur Gordon

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