Jewish Press of Pinellas County

Busy is the new stupid



 

On Sunday, Feb. 24, I was busy. I mean, really busy. The kind of busy that you just try to survive.

That day held three major community events, each of which was not only supported by our Federation, but also of personal interest to me.

The day began with the third annual Tampa Bay Jewish Food Festival, which ran from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Temple B’nai Israel in Clearwater. Next up was the lecture, “The Merchant of Venice was Not an Antisemitic Play,” part of the first (and hopefully annual) St. Petersburg Celebration of the Arts. This presentation started at 2 p.m. at the Florida Holocaust Museum. Finally, the installation of Rabbi Philip Weintraub and the celebration concert by Nefesh Mountain began at 3 o’clock at Congregation B’nai Israel in St. Petersburg.

I made it to all three, but only by carefully timing my early exits and apologetically leaving each just when the fun was beginning. By the time I made it to CBI, I realized that I hadn’t even stopped to enjoy a knish and a latke, I couldn’t even begin to explain the contextual evidence supporting Shylock’s representation in the play as historically well-positioned, and I definitely didn’t have my head in the game to enjoy the Jewish bluegrass music that lifted up the monumental moment of welcoming Rabbi Weintraub.

It cut me deeply during that day when I saw a lovely couple who I met at our January Newcomer Nosh. They had moved to our paradisiac area from Chicago within the last few months and were coming out to a number of events. We’ve been trying to find time for lunch or coffee and keep striking out, playing email tag with days elapsing between messages.

“Oh, we know you’re busy, we’ll figure it out,” they said kindly that busy Sunday at one of the events (I don’t recall which).

It hurt. It wasn’t meant to hurt; they were just stating a fact. But upon reflection, I realized that “busy” is not what I want to be.

Ed Baldwin wrote a piece on Linked-In back in 2016 that he titled “Busy is the New Stupid,” and he captures succinctly the challenge with running hither and yon, trying to multitask and be in many places at once. He writes, “As a society we’ve come to glorify busy. We’ve all been tricked into believing that if we are busy we are important.”

Mic drop.

Baldwin challenges his readers to stop apologizing with an explanation of busyness, such as saying “I’m sorry we haven’t scheduled lunch yet; I’ve been busy,” or “I’m sorry that work has kept me so busy and we haven’t sat down as a family for dinner in weeks.” Rather, he promotes the idea of saying what you’re already saying: “You’re just not a priority to me.”

Ouch.

Rabbi Laura Baum holds the concept in a similar light: what makes it to our calendars is an expression of our personal values. In her piece, “Shabbat in a Fast-Paced World,” part of the Rabbis Without Borders project of Myjewishlearning.com, the concept of staying “busy” reaches back to the Torah. In fact, when the first reference to being “absent-present” appears in the instruction to Moses from G-d to head up to Mt. Sinai and be there. Some might argue this a redundant command (because if he’s going to the top he’s already there) and some might suggest this is equivalent to sitting the kids at the dinner table and having them put away their cell phones.

On that Sunday, racing from event to event, was my calendar expressing my personal values? Were the two weeks that preceded it, during which I had jam-packed more meetings than I should have with individuals and families and committees and board members, a reflection of these values? Maybe. Maybe not. I find myself realizing that my value of building community (which requires many, many cups of coffee and attending many events) needs to be balanced with the time for processing, for responding, for reacting, for mental idleness.

Reaching a few years farther back, in 2012 Tim Krieder wrote in the New York Times “Anxiety” column the piece, “The Busy Trap.” He suggested that “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”

That’s the heart of the matter. In a Hamlet-esque question, we often pair being busy with simply being. We are busy, which must mean we deserve to exist.

As a Jewish community, we task ourselves with repairing the world (tikkun olam) and see ourselves as having the opportunity to make the world a better place. Our lives are filled with meaning when we’re at our best, yet are we at our best when our lives are so “full” that we have rarely a moment to breathe?

So why does this level of busy-ness equate to stupidity? As Baldwin asserts, choosing to be busy “makes us hurried, creates short-sightedness, expands blind spots, increases careless mistakes and results in missed opportunities that we can’t get back.” It’s mismanagement of our time for a reason that doesn’t contribute to tikkun olam. It’s not carving out time for what really matters.

The next time you see me, ask me how I’m doing. If I respond with any mention of “I’m busy,” feel free to slug me in the arm and remind me that busy is truly the new stupid. There is no demand on our time that can’t be balanced with reflection and pause, and that true wisdom springs from taking the time it takes.

Liked it? Loathed it? Want to react? I would welcome your feedback and can be reached at emilie@jewishpinellas.org.

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