Busyness

I pulled out my phone and opened my calendar.  Surely finding a free evening sometime in November shouldn't be that difficult...

EIGHT evenings.  That's all.  That's all the weeknight evenings in November that are unaccounted for--as of the end of October.  It wasn't even November yet and the month was basically already over, or at least it seemed that way.

I'm struggling.  I'm honestly struggling.  I plan, and plan, and plan until there is nothing left.  I've shared this snippet from Shauna Niequist's book Bittersweet before, but it seems applicable yet again:

"I love it when a day's activities stack up on top of each other perfectly, from breakfast to work to lunch to grocery shopping to coffee, all the way through till I fall into bed.  I love days when you're always leaving something early to arrive just a touch late at the next place, like pearls on a string or Tarzan swinging on vines, feet never touching the ground."

I love that too.  In a sick and twisted sort of way.  I love to be busy.

Shauna goes on to talk about how the busyness creates a loss in the end.  You can't be involved with everything and still find quality time.  You stop listening, paying attention, being aware.  You're too focused on "doing" that you can't appreciate "being".  That's me.  A lot of the time.  I've taken "busy" to an unhealthy place.  A schedule so jam packed that only eight mid-week evenings are still free in an entire month.

So when my Monday night D-group meetings got moved to Sundays after church, I did an internal happy dance.  A free evening.  A gift from God!

And you know that I was initially inclined to do?  Schedule it.  I actually started wracking my brain to think of all the people I've wanted to see and just haven't had time to see lately, and then I stopped.  This is how the insanity begins.  This is invariably how I end up at this point time and time again.

The longer I let my mind wrap around a free evening each week, the calmer I feel.  Life necessitates boundaries.  Scheduling boundaries need to exist.  I can only do so much for so many people in any given time.  And I can't effectively give to people when I'm completely depleted.  But for some reason, scheduling time just for myself seems like a waste.  It still puzzles me.

Perhaps that is because my time is invaluable.  In fact, I had a conversation with a friend where I realized that tithing is no big deal, but the giving of my time is the real sacrifice.  With a finite number of hours in the day and days in the week, and countless things that "need to" and "should" get done, there just never seems to be enough time.  I want to do it all, but I can't. 

I don't frequently wish that I lived in another era, I'm rather fond of modern convenience, but the slower pace of times gone is something I wish we had more of now.  How did we get to the point of never-ending appointments, meetings, assignments.  Is that really the cost of "modern convenience" or have we lost sight of things?