‘Occupied she always was —busy rarely.’ Villette, Charlotte Bronte
Busy is the buzzword isn’t it?, we worship busyness in our current culture, we associate it with important. Busy indicates more and we think more is better; more money, more materials, more friends, more degrees, titles, more emails, contacts, and of course activities. This is how we crowd our lives, our environment, our days, and nights. Then we lose ourselves in this crowded mess. We become aliens to ourselves, to our lives, to the present moment. We mistake the crowding; the number of likes, the number of appointments, the number of people who call our name with what we most crave; attention. After all, we wonder: if no one sees us, do we even exist?
Occupied on the other hand indicates we are engaged, we lend ourselves to the present activity. And in this case, one becomes attention itself rather than seeking it. If you are eating you are occupied eating, if you are reading you are reading, when you are with a friend you are there with her, with all your being, with your ability and inability to listen, talk, play. When we are occupied, there is more spaciousness around us, and a choice we had made, the responsibility for our choice and the empowerment that comes with it.
With this in mind, I intend to delete busy from my vocabulary, that is almost never the state I want to be in, I’d rather be occupied.
