Hey. Can we talk about humans?
About how different we all are?
About how cool that is?
But then how incredible it is that underneath all those ridiculous differences, there’s this sliver of us that is the same?
Nah. Not today. I spend at least an hour a day marveling at that thought, but I haven’t gotten any further than that, so we’ll leave it for another post. One day.
Can we talk about how much I hate being busy?
Maybe for a minute?
For the past two weeks, I was so darn busy.
Between the courses I’ve been taking and a new job I was trying for extra money, my brain almost exploded from busy. I didn’t have time to write a blog post. A blog post. You know that tiny thing I write once a week?
Yeah, no time.
I hated it.
I hated that at night, the time that I usually use to find whatever in me that makes me who I am, that time was taken up with studying and notebooks and math.
Most of all, I hated that things that I love to do, like write, listen to music, go on walks, learn Jewish stuff, brainstorm, be creative, think..all those things became second priority, and there was no time.
I’m not cut out for a busy life. I search for meaning in every single thing I see and do, and searching for meaning takes time.
It doesn’t happen in the two minutes I have left as I fall asleep.
Most of all, and worst of all, I hated that I wasn’t finding meaning in anything I was doing. It was cut and dry. It was not for me.
So I stopped.
I made a crazy decision, and as the person I am, I said I’m not going to continue living without time to be me.
I’m not going to try to cram Me into my day, in the few seconds between school and work.
I’m still doing school- don’t worry, I’m not throwing my whole life away.
But I did re-prioritize.
Now, I’ll have no money, and that really does suck.
But gosh, I’ll have my mind back.
How could I compare?
There are people who will tell me it’s a foolish move.
Life is meant for being busy. Life is meant to be filled with things you don’t like to do, for the sake of supporting oneself and ones family.
That may be true, for some. But I pray to G-d every morning that he allows me the beautiful freedom to define my life by who He made me. I hardly think I was put on this world to make a pay-check. I hardly think the way I spent the last two weeks made G-d warm and fuzzy inside. Because by being that busy, I lost G-d. I found myself rushing through davening, skipping the parts that make it mean something. I found myself being less careful, because I had less time. I didn’t take the time to learn something new or even think about G-d. By losing G-d, I was also losing myself.
I almost did it, by the way. I was so close to convincing myself to stick it through, because this is what people do. This is what humans do. They work to live, they live to work. This is adulthood.
But then I stopped. I couldn’t do that to myself. I couldn’t do it to my spirit. I couldn’t even do it to my employer.
Is life about sticking through things?
Maybe it is, and I’m sure a thousand real adults will be glad to tell me how wrong I am.
Maybe.
For now, I’ll focus my efforts on finding the things in life that teach me responsibility but also continue to encourage my love for life and everything meaningful.
I’ll search for something that will fill my day with a good busy. A busy that expresses me. A busy that I can find myself in.
People might say it’s a scary way to live, but I find the alternative much scarier.