Article December 11, 2017 Issue

Busy and stressed, or active and joyous?

Dave Oakes

“Busy.” I had been hearing this apparently innocuous word a lot in casual conversations, and it got me to wondering why I was hearing it so often and if, in fact, it was so innocent.

Being diligent, industrious, and hard-working can, of course, be seen as a virtue. But the busyness that I was hearing was accompanied by a “too much to do and too little time to do it” sense of stress. And the frequency with which I was hearing the word made me wonder if it was more of an imposition than I originally thought. When I developed the symptoms of busyness in my own life, I felt impelled to pray for spiritual clarity and joy.

I found myself feeling burdened by a number of work tasks needing to be accomplished, and a sense of responsibility to get them all done. I had bought into being busy with its associated baggage of stress, impatience, and frustration. It seemed like an assault on my own thinking.

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