Past week after our production deployment of this new system I felt I had it. It was not overwhelming, it was not anxiety, it was not like nothing else fit in my brain. It was just that something was missing. I turned to my boss. I was working too much, for what…? I thought to myself, this is a work problem and I have to solve it. I need a raise, praise, you name it. But I’m certainly not doing well here and I will find some place where I do. He just answered thinking I was burn out and needed a change: we can put you in this others projects. He didn’t understand. After I left the office that day, it came to me that maybe I was the one that didn’t understand.
I was listening to On Being magnificent podcast by Krista Tippett, The Power of Words to Save Us ↗ and this podcast always reminds me of something but I can’t be sure of what. It makes me connect with my inner self. In this episode, Marie Howe said something that really, deeply made me think: It hurts being present. I thought this is so beautiful. Until I began realizing that it’s true. Not universally true, that I don’t know, but true for me.
My boss passed my words to others in the company and this guy comes over and says: Mary, you have to take your career in your hands, you can’t expect people will give you a raise even if your doing great work, you have to look away from work and take your career in your hands. I’m thinking I thought doing good work was taking my career in my hands.
In that moment it hit me. I had been so into work, so focused on doing stuff, finishing things for so long . I had lost contacts with my friends that are abroad. Now I just write when they write me, I only called my house on important dates. I was not getting in touch with anything outside work. I told everyone I was busy. Listen guys I’m so busy I can’t call, I can’t see the link you sent, I just don’t have the physical time, it’s work. I have to do this.
And then I realized, I remembered Marie Howe words: you are just avoiding being present. You are avoiding your life and in the process, neglecting yourself. And believe me, realizing this also hurts. It’s like now I have to answer other questions, the ones that really matters: Is this the life I want? What am I missing? I need to write, I need other things to feed me outside work. I love what I do. I had to fight to do it. Being a girl programming in my university was like a sin, I had to raise my voice, ask, ask and ask until I found someone who heard me and let me work programming in a project for them. This took years, we are not saying months here. Maybe another post story. But still, I needed something else.
I started reading Brain Pickings, not surprise I found it through On Being. In one of the posts, Maria Popova talks how Seneca wrote about the danger of the busy life and the art of living wide rather than living long. ↗
You must match time’s swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow… Just as travelers are beguiled by conversation or reading or some profound meditation, and find they have arrived at their destination before they knew they were approaching it; so it is with this unceasing and extremely fast-moving journey of life, which waking or sleeping we make at the same pace — the preoccupied become aware of it only when it is over.
As a great coincidence I found today on DHH’s Twitter ↗ this:
Busyness serve as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possible be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.
I’m no saving the world. I’m not creating a lifetime changing device or technology. I am not saving people in remote places where help is not a word because nobody expect to be helped. I’m writing algorithms to pass data from one place to the other and to format data. I’m not saying is not important or useful for the parts involved, it just not to be busy and disconnected from myself and the world all the time. The balance is important. Other pursuits in life are important. I never forget about how this writing mentor told me 10 years ago: You better write now that you are not under pressure than when you can’t wait anymore and just HAVE to do it. I didn’t believe him, we choose our works and passions. But being oblivious of our passions it’s a way of dying. You can be dead being alive. And being busy is a form of dead. The busyness to forget. To not being present. To not ask the hard questions.
I don’t know where all this reflection will take me and how it’ll change my approach to life. I’m sure it will. I still want to create and work. I just don’t want my life meaning to be tied to off-hours calls/ messages from work.
Stay present.
Originally published on Medium ↗.