External/Individual

Enactment of Busyness

FEAR

slithers forth in an adaptive shape—in the fallen world and in the story that I am

banished. In every family and extinction period, the inflamed limbic system

Is handed down from generation to generation like a trophy.

There’s no joy in the landscape when we control what we cannot.

We obsess about the danger and the shame. We have eaten of the apple.

Do you remember? loving playfulness in the childhood garden?

We have all known love in the flowering bower, or we would have died alone.

We have all known play or that would have killed us, like baby rats

Huddling in the corner covered in cat fur. You know it. Change the perception

and even the mountains change from broken into glory. But you will need help.

You know this too. However much the infant monkey wants to cling

to a metal frame to stay protected and self-contained.

We have a creative soulful need inside us.

Holy the ritual that helps EXPAND Toward Truth and Beauty.

Nothing you don’t know in the end.

The Worker

Burned Out, Pained, Lethargic

The job is what you do when you’re told what to do. The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed. Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.  Seth Godin, The Lynchpin

 

Exhausted on his bedrock, the workaholic Bear has made heroic efforts, herculean efforts, striving just to strive. We might also call him the performer. The gifted one. Extraordinary. The Workhorse. The hero. His life coach/mentor will remind him he is a high achiever who will not be content to do less than 110 percent. His parents may deem him special or the perfect child. While his wife and children will wonder where he went.

There are rewards for being seen as a “doing.” In most occupations, Workers are praised if they stay on task for hours on end. Or sometimes “being committed to the mission” is just so baked into the business, profession, and culture that it’s hardly noticed. Work, work, work, work is noted only when it lapses.

Salesmen are expected to sell all the time and entertain their clients. Lawyers are expected to litigate as much as they can and help develop the firm. Doctors are on call countless days in a row and are expected to prescribe like an assembly-line machine, pushing out one patient after another.

Many organizations have a tacit expectation for their managers and “important people” (senior staff): they are to be available always. This might come with truly little praise, but maybe with a financial incentive, a fatter paycheck.  In such a workplace, vacations are not really time off, just time to catch up, until you cannot catch up anymore. And then you are replaced.

Why this painting?

The painting wonders. “How are you doing? Are you always doing?

We live in a society that espouses meritocracy, the belief that we achieve through herculean efforts and commitment. We will then be elevated, given power, and rewarded with the newest products on the market, heralded as a hero in all the ways Workers are valued (mostly economically).

Interestingly, many physicians immediately and seriously discount the pain of medical school and residency and their years of relentless studying, wand the stress of making life and death decisions. Lawyers dismiss the years when they were pressed beyond their limits, when they had no life except working to make their way into a notable firm. CEOs often dedicate their life to the demands of the Board and investors.

“It isn’t so bad.” They take pride in it. “That’s just what it takes to be a dedicated professional.”

In the pressure cooker long enough, Workers are so estranged from life that they literally demand to be constantly driven, as if stress itself is the force that gives life meaning. There’s an energy in repetitively overcoming the impossible, an arrogance in rolling the boulder up the hill, finding glory in a superior role and the crazy amount of exertion it requires.

“Look what I can do!” That’s the satisfaction of a performance animal. While many other parts of life become shut out or minimized, the Worker can’t waste time for love or family, or to chill, or not do anything because that feels lazy.

Inside Out

“What do you expect me to do? Someone in this family must sacrifice so we can live like this!”

If you are a Worker, I would suggest that there are less obvious, less rational-sounding reasons that you are busying yourself to death. There is some history that explains this drive, though you will likely resist making time to reflect.

Deflecting from self-exploration, Workers prefer to focus on some (maybe secret) pleasures, the titles that come from being important, the fact that they are on the right committee or are the crucial member of an esteemed board, being the decision-maker. Of course, working class heroes often have the best things that formidable efforts can buy; driving an expensive car, owning a house or two with a ridiculous amount of square footage, being early adapters of the newest technology.

Perhaps, in a depleted, more vulnerable moment, they might leak out what is below the surface, deep-seated distress, often-misdirected resentments:

“I hate sitting in front of computer screen typing in notations demanded by the hospital. I despise it. It’s stupid. Of course, I’m sarcastic. I can’t tolerate stupidity.”

If you are working too hard, and want to make a Heart-drama inquiry, start with investigating how your childhood set you up for this. Ask yourself these questions. Are you Working for Love, for some little affirmation? How often (when you’re busy, busy, busy) do you experience work as meaningless drudgery? Are your efforts to stay working long hours, even into burn-out, sometimes a way to seek relief from the loneliness, boredom or anxiety that shows up when you try to chill? Is there an underlying sense of self-loathing, dis-ease?

Upside down:

In this society, we have all Worked for Love. By the time we enter high school most of us have learned (by the media or extended family or church or in sports or elsewhere) how to get strokes for being dutiful, obsessive, driven. We get shaped (to borrow Pavlovian language) to express only those thoughts and gestures that have potential to bring some crumbs of attention, acceptance, connection (if not Love exactly).

Reflect on how many people seem to avoid intimate contact and affiliation, appearing to settle for filling up their empty spaces with stuff or certificates. If they have enough available space, you might not call them a hoarder, but they have a hoarder’s mentality and a Worker’s anxiety buried deep in the ground. They may fear they will be forsaken in a cruel world if they stop. For the seasoned Worker, that’s not a fear they want to dig up. At its best, authentic work in the world (Loving Work of the Artist) is endowed with the inherent pleasure of competence, becoming more adept at a craft that has purpose. In contrast, Workers believe (sometimes accurately) that people in authority will punish them if they slow down.

If you try to bring understanding to a Worker, expect they will deny that busyness is driven by fear. Fear. Busy. Fear. Busy. Fear. Busy.  And then the Addict shows up to give some relief.