I busied myself with kneading the flour before rushing off to hang the clothes and vacuum the floor. I then wipe the tables and water the plants. This goes on.
And all the while, I have this sinking feeling in my chest. This feeling of restlessness.
I am exhausted but don’t feel like I can stop. I seem to think of something else that needs doing while I’m doing my ‘last chore’.
But if I stop and let myself think for a moment, it’s not that I have too much to do. It’s that I don’t dare to stop doing.
Because when I do, I’ll need to face my thoughts and feelings.
I’m avoiding.
But what exactly?
My feelings, of course.
More specifically, the feelings that I don’t like – fear, sadness, anxiety are common ones that I find hard to sit with.
But running around busying myself with the outside world will not make these feelings go away. All they do is sit there in the background, waiting for me to pause doing. And when I stop at last (because we all need to at some point) they loom high over me. Fearful dark spirits devouring me because I dared to stop running.
But it doesn’t need to be this way. These ‘negative feelings’ grow only because we feed them with our fear of facing them. If we accept that they are there and just sit with them, we’ll find that they have no devouring power at all. Rather, they are like dark clouds that may envelop us for a time but will always blow away with the wind.
So the next time you find yourself ‘so busy you have no time to sit down’, ask yourself this question:
Am I busy because I don’t dare to rest?
Inevitably, the answer is YES.
Then the next question is:
Why?
And when you figure out why, face it. Accept it. And your need to be busy will go away.
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