These days when I run into a friend on the Masset main street, they are often in a mighty hurry.
“Great to see you, how you been, how you doing?” the exchange begins, and before I can think of an honest answer, he or she inevitably replies for me. “Busy?”
Before I can open my mouth to admit, “No, in fact I am not busy, I even had time to schedule half an hour of unscheduled time into my Life-At-A-Glance this morning,” they are long gone, cell phone connected importantly to their ear.
Comedian Ellen DeGeneres calls our culture’s mad theology of speed TBS (Too Busy Syndrome). Busy implies that life is so full and harried that we have no time to live it to the fullest. Busy means my phone never stops ringing, with agents calling to offer six figure deals and film moguls scrambling over each others bodies to option my latest poetry book. Busy means I have no openings in November or December, but perhaps I can pencil you in for coffee on a slow January Sunday between noon and quarter past.
In her novel, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote, “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” I have spent much of my life like most of us, leapfrogging from one errand to the next, hurriedly checking off everything on my To Do List before another day grinds to a close. There was little or no time in my overbooked agenda for the kind of dreamy, soulful activities that once upon a time sustained us. Perhaps technology, which forces us to live faster and faster all the time, but not necessarily with any depth – can be blamed. Life is about producing —making more money, winning another medal, acquiring more stuff: it’s about product nowadays, not process. We have become so obsessed with doing that we have nothing left over – time, energy, or imagination – for being anymore. Our society values us not for what we are, but for what we do for a living, what we own or strive to acquire. In other words, for our usefulness.
An issue of Utne addresses our collective conundrum, in an article about Mercury Retrograde (the chaotic period in which we are now in the midst – November 9th to 29th) and a good time, astrologers say, to take a retreat, spend time in solitude, or, at the very least, make our inner life a priority.) “The modern world seems to recognize only one pace: busyness. Yet for centuries men and women have taught that true contentment lies in the simply lived life, of which unhurried time is a major part.” Unhurried time means time to slow down and smell the roses, take your delight in momentariness, live for today. We need balance in our lives – to jump when it makes sense to jump (when fleeing to higher ground from a tsunami) and calm down when slowness is called for (waiting for the phone to be answered at the Masset clinic). But most people have no time these days to prune the roses let alone slow down long enough to sniff them.
Unhurried time means paying attention to the ant trying to make it from one end of your counter to the other. Taking the best part of a morning to watch a slug going nowhere, slowly. (David Phillips, who owned Copper Beech House in Masset for many years before I took over, once stopped traffic on the Tlell River Bridge because a slug was trying to cross from one side to the other. They whisked him away to Riverview, the popular mental hospital back in the day: our culture doesn’t have a lot of time for people who come between us and our “getting there”.)
Last week, recovering from a cold and inner ear infection on Vancouver Island, I lay in bed listening to what I thought must be ceremonial drumming from the Big House on the nearby rez. I opened my window to let in more of the sound that has, over the years, connected me with something more time-sacred and transcendent than my ordinary concerns. Silence weighted the night air; when I closed my window the drumming started again, constant, insistent, a heartbeat-sound only faster than I’d ever heard it before. This time, I realized, the sound came from inside me, from my own heart racing away in darkness.
I rolled over, trying to escape this annoying reminder of my mortality. My heartbeat only began to slow to its normal comforting pace when I relaxed, breathed deeply, and began really listening to it. I had to come to grips with it: my heart, that lonely muscle, wasn’t going to go on thumping away inside me forever. Like everything else that happens in these too-busy days, I told myself, it is only temporary.
If you meet Susan Musgrave on the street, please do not ask her if she is busy. Or, better still, offer her a temporary job so that she can avoid writing and at least appear to be busy.
