The disease is called "I'm busy"

A couple of days ago I met a friend on the street. He stopped and asked, "How do you, as a family»

She looked a bottom-up, and quietly murmured to me: "I'm so busy ... so busy. So much bulk, can not imagine. "

Almost immediately, I ran with my friend and asked how he was. And again the same tone, the same answer: "I'm so busy ... so much to do." Quavering voice, tired, cracked.

So, not only with adults. When we were ten years ago, we moved to North Carolina, we were thrilled: great city, great schools. We stayed in a nice neighborhood where families with children live. I was sure that everything is fine.




A couple of days after moving, we proposed a friendly neighbor to our daughter collected and played together. The neighbor - a great, by the way, the man - reached for the phone and opened the diary. She leafed through it ... and leafing through ... and thumbed through. For a long time leafing through. Finally, she said: "That is, it has a free 45-minute through the two and a half weeks. The remaining time to do gymnastics, piano and voice lessons. She's just, well ... very busy. "

This terrible, destructive habit of "being busy" develops in us a very, very early.

Will we ever end up living like that? Why did we create this along? Why do this to their children? Exactly when we forget that we are people and machines?

For children it is normal to feel sad, run through puddles, play, make mistakes, and even bored. We all love our children. But why do we then overload them from childhood, that their life was a perpetual stress and a minute of free time - as we do?

What happened to the world, where we could sit with your loved ones and, slowly, to talk about what we think and feel? Where the conversation, full of eloquent silence, which do not need to interrupt?

As we have created a world where we have the mountain of cases, things and there is no time to rest, reflect, communicate, just be?

We read of Socrates: "A man who does not comprehend life and to live it is not necessary." How do you want us to comprehend, have become a man, if we are so busy?

This disease is called "I'm busy" (and this is a diagnosis) is destructive to our health and well-being. It prevents us from being close to my family, when we were all sitting in the same room. It does not allow us to create the 'affinities', which we so desperately crave.

Since 1950, there are so many new technologies. We thought (we were promised!), That progress will make life easier, more intuitive, more free. And we can not, in fact we do not have any freedom, just relax, as they could only a few decades ago.

For the so-called "elite" of society the boundary between work and home was erased altogether. All the time we stare into tablets. All. Is our. Time.

Smartphones and laptops mean that there is no difference between the office and home. Children fall asleep, and we are back online.

My personal daily war - it's an avalanche of e-mails. Hell, I have declared jihad against the personal e-mail. I am forever buried under hundreds of emails and have no idea how to end it. I tried everything: answering letters only in the evening, do not read them at the weekend, people asked for a personal meeting instead of a pair of lines. And all the letters piling up and piling up: personal, work, advertising, spam. And people are waiting for a response - right now, not tomorrow. And I, too, turns out to be ... I'm so busy.

Other worse. Many are working two jobs for meager wages to family stayed afloat. Twenty percent of our children live in poverty, and our elderly parents are forced to look for jobs as watchmen and technicals to keep a roof over your head and eat your fill. We're busy.

So you can not live

When I ask, "How are you", what I'm really asking?

I'm not asking about the list and not about how many emails you still have to answer. I ask, what is happening now in your heart. So tell me.

Tell me what your heart rejoices, or hurt, or sad, tell me what your heart yearns for human warmth. Take a look for yourself in your heart, and then tell me. If I say, I want to know - know the answer to a live person.

Say that you are aware that you are a person, not a machine that automatically cross out items from the to-do list. Let's see each other in the eye, shake hands. Let's just talk: talk banish stress, at least in part, give the feeling that you are not alone.

Take my hand, take a look in the eye and be completely with me just one second. Tell us about your heart and make my heart is awake. Help me to remember that I am also a person who craves human warmth.

I teach at a university, where students are able to "learn from the shock and shock rest" and proud of it. This is a reflection of the life of all of us, even when we relax, we dipped into the same world of surge. Our holiday - the same actions: bright and action sports to sweat.

And what, you ask? I dont know. I do not have any magic solutions. All that I know - we lose the ability to live a real human life.

We need a different attitude to work and technologies. We know what we want: meaningfulness, a sense of community, a good life. It's not just about how to "eat" and "buy iPhone abruptly." We want to live like human beings.

The poet William Yeats wrote: "The man who will dare to explore the dark corners of his soul, need more courage than the soldier on the battlefield."

As we explore the dark corners of his soul, when we are so busy? How do we perceive life?

I hope that you offer sensible decision: how to begin to live, how to change our society.

I want my children ran through the puddles, dreaming, and even missed - learning to be human. I want to live in a world where we can stop, look into each other's eyes, and touch together to understand what's going on in our hearts.

I'll take a break to think about their own lives, to listen to his weary soul, to know who I am.

See also World after the quantum transition: we are living in a different dimension

! In your heart is happening the same thing?

Let us at least try to build a world in which, when one of us says, "I'm so busy," the second replied: "I know, my friend. I know. We are all busy. But tell me, what's going on in your heart. "

© Vladimir Pirozhka