There are two kinds of busyness, one of quantity and one of quality. With the first kind of busyness we take on so many worthwhile tasks that it begins to seem like a kind of neurosis. …Each day we want to do what is most important, but not knowing what that one task might be, we take on twelve or fifty, like the student taking an exam who writes down every possible answer, hoping that one of them will be right.

…The second kind of busyness isn't as much about doing a lot as it is about having a busy mind. [Some time ago I made it my practice] to spend part of each morning in my wheelchair looking out across the lawn, over the stone wall and across acres of meadow to where Red Hill rises over the forest. Swallows snatch bugs over the field, the phoebe tends her nest above the doorway, a breeze stirs about my ankles…

Meanwhile I'm thinking about the pile of loam in my yard that somebody has got to do something with; I'm thinking [someone's got to mow the meadow or it will go entirely to goldenrod]; I'm thinking of screens to be put up and windows to be washed; I'm thinking of the culvert that's got to be put in the driveway, and [when the plumber will come];… I'm thinking I should check my e-mail and have the nozzles replaced on my color printer; I'm thinking… I should give up writing and instead get serious about learning Sanskrit, and then I'm thinking my coffee has gone cold and I've managed to waste most of a morning staring at the view again.

Why do we do this to ourselves? A mischievous meditation teacher once told a group of us not to worry about all this busyness inside our heads. 'It's not such a big deal', he said. 'After all, it's just a question of how we spend our time every second for the rest of our lives.'

Being Busy
Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, December 8, 2002

What does it mean to be busy? It's a question I've been working with lately as a part of my spiritual practice, and it was motivated by noticing both kinds of busyness that Philip Simmons holds up in our reading. I have a busy life, filled with activity that often seems to run without a break from the time I get up until I drop off to sleep. And I have a busy mind, so that taking a break from the busyness of activity is not all that straightforward a proposition. I can easily order my body to go to the meditation cushion and sit down to just breathe for a little while. My mind is another thing entirely.

We have a new cat in our household, a half-grown kitten named Malcolm, and he has become the perfect metaphor for busy mind. He walks across the keyboard when I'm typing or leaps on the piano keys when the girls are practicing. He jumps out from under the bed in quiet moments to attack unsuspecting ankles. He bats objects of all sizes off of tables and crashes them around the floor, the noisier the better. He dances across the countertops when we're trying to fix dinner, he leaps into the flowerpots and tries to dig while I'm watering the plants. He climbs up onto laps at the worst possible moment and bats at eyeglasses, and for every time he's thrown off will happily jump back on so quickly it's as though he's tied to a bungee cord. He scratches to be let in when he is banished from a room, making his presence felt whether or not we give him our attention.

That's the physical, furry equivalent of busy mind. It's chattering away distractedly all the time, but at least for me it's most noticeable when my body is still, during meditation. As soon as I have settled down and taken the first quiet breath, my mind is racing off like Malcolm, or like the most hyperactive of children. I think about the 'to do' list for when I begin my work; I recall a recent e-mail or phone message and compose the answer in my head; I worry about the weather and wonder whether the propane tank needs filling; I think about the last thing one of my children said before boarding the bus, the dream I had last night, the dinner I will cook tonight. You all know the list; you all do it too, or some version of it. Busy mind chatters away within us all, droning on in what is, if we really look at it, an appallingly boring monologue. And yet on it goes.

It's difficult to get a handle on either kind of busyness, the outer or the inner. No matter how frantic or overloaded we feel, it takes a real effort of will to look hard at all of our activities and let go of something without instantly replacing it with something else. It takes a literally moment-by-moment effort of will to quiet our busy minds for even a few breaths of true inner stillness. And yet with both kinds of busyness it can be helpful to start with the simple question, 'What does it mean to be busy?'

We all know what it feels like to have too much to do in a limited period of time. We butt up against a deadline, or an unexpected chore is added to our already lengthy list, or the holidays come along and the ordinary tasks are joined by the extraordinary ones as we send cards, bake special goodies, shop for presents, host holiday parties. Even the things we like best can end up making us crabby and stressed when we don't seem to have time enough to get them done.

That's the sort of thing we think of when we say that we're busy: we've got a whole list of things to do and a limited time in which to do them. But I've found that this definition of busy doesn't really hold up, at least for me.

There are times in which I can find myself feeling frantically busy, fretting against the deadlines and sure I'm dropping multiple balls. But then later that same day with only a fraction of the list accomplished, or on another day at least as full, I don't find myself fretting at all. At those times I move through a whole flow of seamless activity and feel alert, connected and even vaguely serene. And the more I notice this the more it seems that busyness is a state of mind rather than a state of activity. If that's true -- or even partly true -- then how might I get a handle on that state of mind and begin to shift it?

I've begun to play around with two mental games that I will share with you today because I've learned over the years that I am almost never alone in my foibles and my struggles. I know for a fact that I am not the only one in this room who struggles with how to feel less busy as I move through my life. So these mental games, which I am still playing, might be useful for some of you as well.

The first is to practice not using the word 'busy' to describe how I am doing, especially in response to that casually friendly question, 'How are you?' It's a way of recognizing that 'busy' has become a part of my story: "How am I? I'm really busy these days". It might be true; but by letting it be my reflexive answer, it seems to me I keep feeding into the attitude loop in a direction I don't want to go. What else is true about how I am besides busyness? What is more true than that? Trying to answer truthfully but differently leaves me tongue-tied some of the time, and a look of mild concern can grow on the face of the inquirer as he or she waits to hear how I am. But even when I feel overloaded, I am not merely busy. In fact I am not as busy as I am blessed, healthy, happy, engaged, interested, and a host of other things.

It's an odd, subtle difference it seems to make, but when someone asks how I am and I give myself the couple of heartbeats to notice that I am blessed, that I am well, that I am content -- or even that I am concerned for the state of the world and worried about where we might be heading -- I don't feel so busy. There is a lot of power in our words. There is a lot of power in the stories we tell ourselves and each other about our lives. To reclaim the language of those stories makes a difference in how we understand our lives.

The second mental exercise has become kind of a Zen koan for me, a play on the phrase we say so often when someone interrupts an activity: "I'm busy right now", we say. It's interesting to make it into a question, especially when we find ourselves in the tense, strained state of mind that comes about from feeling there is too much to do and too little time for it. When I feel too busy I ask myself, "Am I busy right now?" And oddly, it seems to me that the only possible answer to that question is, "no". Right now, I'm driving to work on the Hartford Turnpike. Right now I am speaking these words to you from the pulpit. Right now I am putting down the spoon next to the pot of stew so that I can answer the ringing telephone. Right now I am sitting still on my meditation cushion, and despite the neurotic chattering of my mind, I am not busy: I am sitting still.

Am I busy right now? The more often I ask myself that question, the clearer it seems to me that busyness is in my mind, not in my world. In my world, there is an endless stream of tasks that call to my hands and my heart, and in each moment my hand and heart can find a response to some number of them. But I do not have to be busy as I turn myself to that response. I can simply be present to the calling, to the task, of that moment. And to be present is, it seems to me, pretty much the polar opposite of being busy.

In September I was really busy, in all the classic habitual ways. At USNH we had all of the start-up activity of our congregational year, complicated by the building program, new staff and the continuing need for fundraising. Family life was also crammed, since the school year also starts in September, so there were new teachers and bus schedules and after school activities to adjust to. My spouse has a job that intensifies in the couple of months preceding elections, so September also meant more travel for him and more preoccupation when he was home.

And to top it all off, in the last weekend of September every year our town of Durham hosts an enormous agricultural fair. This might seem at first blush to add little to my personal busyness list -- until you realize that there are approximately seventeen million categories for crafts and cooking and projects to enter in the Durham fair, and that the entire culture of the town encourages children to enter as many of them as they possibly can.

I thought that I had paced all of this pretty well, but on the Saturday before the fair -- with Nick out of town and both girls still trying frantically to finish up multiple projects before deadline -- I realized that we were on the slippery slope toward total meltdown. We had been working on things all day long, but by late afternoon Maris was still at the kitchen table trying to finish a collage and Hannah was at the counter trying to finish a pie crust, and I was scurrying between them through the food dye and flour spilled on the floor. I was internally cursing whatever lunatic first came up with the Durham fair and getting more and more impatient to be finished, to be done, to be able to move on to the next thing because I was really busy, after all, and these projects were taking up so much time.

And then there was a moment of crystalline revelation as I truly heard this monologue in my mind: I am really busy and I need to be done with all of this so I can get on to the next thing. And I literally stopped in my tracks, there in the chaos of that kitchen.

What else did I think I should be doing with my life besides spending this time with my children? It struck me like the proverbial lightening bolt that this precise moment, with all its small frustrations and its mess, its chaos and occasional tears, was nevertheless the most exquisite of times. Wouldn't it be exactly this kind of moment that would compose all of my future nostalgia, this kind that I would yearn for when my children were grown and gone, this moment that I would want just one more of? And yet there I was trying to rush through it, get it over with, so I could get on to all the other things making me so busy.

It's that kind of realization that makes me think our busyness is really a kind of insanity, one so pervasive that it's almost completely invisible to us. We aren't busy simply because we have so much to do. We're busy because we're never completely doing what we're doing: we're running the tape in our heads that recites the list of all the other things we'll do when this one is done. But when we move on to the next thing the list scrolls down as well, so our mind is always humming with news about everything in the world except the real moment we're living, the real task that claims our hands in this moment.

There is a wonderful Buddhist teaching story that tells of a monk who was sweeping the ground, when another monk passed by and scolded, 'You're too busy!' The sweeping monk flung his arm up in the air holding the broom aloft and said, "Is this busy?"

Sometimes, when busy mind descends on me, I hold to that image of the broom lifted up against the sky as the perfect icon for the full life lived without busyness. The broom in the hand of the monk is in constant motion going about its work, and yet because it is not planning or thinking or worrying as it works, there is also a stillness to it. The broom does its work perfectly, but it is not busy.

Writer Susan Moon, who practices Zen meditation, writes in her own reflections on this story, "[I realized that] no matter how busy my mind was during [meditation], there was always some part of me who was not busy, who was just sitting there, upright, facing the wall…Sometimes I imagine my spinal column as the one who isn't busy, upright in the middle of my body, while the thoughts swirl, the heart beats, the blood rushes around, the air goes in and out….When a wheel turns, the circumference moves the fastest. As you go toward the center, the motion is slower and slower. At the very center of the circle is a point that is completely still. That's where Buddha sits."

There is a verse in the Tao Te Ching that says,
A truly good person does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone.
A foolish person is always doing, yet much remains to be done.

When we're right on track, awake and alert to our lives, our doing is a part of our being. Nothing is left undone because we are present to each moment and the task within it is the only thing that claims us. We are the moving broom, doing the work of the moment and yet not busy. When we fall off track and become the foolish one, we are everywhere except within the real moment, the present moment. Our minds leap ahead to the next task or dwell behind us on one that went before, and what is left undone is this now, this reality in front of us.

I don't want to pretend it's easy to unbutton ourselves from our busyness, to change our vision and our story. Like so much else that's truly worthwhile, this isn't a once-and-for-all shift but something to engage with every day. When we hear the storyline running through our minds about how busy we are, how much we have to do, it can make a difference just to query ourselves: Is that true? Am I busy right now? Or am I simply doing this one thing?

For those of us who will add to our plates because it's December, this becomes especially important. Can we choose, clearly and deliberately, only those holiday trappings that give us joy? And once we've chosen, can we bake cookies with the children or grandchildren, hang the ornaments or send the cards with attention -- present to just this tray of cookies, to this one lovely ornament, to the note we write to this one friend? Active -- but not busy.

Later on in the essay from which I drew our reading today, Philip Simmons writes: "A friend of mine once held out her hand to show me the painting that her teenage daughter had done on her thumbnail. It was the view from their dock on the lake: a sailboat on the water, an island in the distance, the sky above. I was impressed by the skill but more so by the fact that this busy woman and her daughter had sat still together for long enough to do such a thing.

"Sometimes I can sit in the meadow and simply feel the sun on me, letting this small warmth be a grace, knowing that all creation has conspired to produce this hour, this breeze cooling the back of my neck, this fly tickling my shin. We have all known such moments, such islands of respite. On some level we are always searching for our life's work, wanting to align our doing and our being with our highest purpose. At such moments of calm we find, to our surprise, that our life's work is here in our hands, at this very moment; it is here as we gaze into another's eyes, it is here in each breath we receive from and give back to the world." AMEN.