busyness on Ambition

Restlessness keeps the pedal to the metal. To offer a suggestive analogy in this vein: several years ago there was a recall on some Toyota vehicles. Evidently the cars would be given to sudden and unc...

The witness of Christian history is that the ambitious need quiet hearts. We need ancient paths for our modern, busy lives that teach us to be settled with God in an unsettling world.

Precisely because our frenzy is fundamentally aimless while remaining driven, we set ourselves goals whose main purpose is to keep the frenzy going until it consummates itself in sloth. If at present ...

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

My temptation is to tackle everything at once, or nothing at all.

Aren’t you like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don’t you often hope: “May this book, idea, course, trip, jo...

It is a sprinting, squirting, shoving age.

The Japanese have a word, ikigai, that captures this sense of drive we all have inside us. Roughly translated as “the happiness of constant busyness,” ikigai reflects your awareness of your life’s pur...

A fanatic has been described as a person who, when unsure of his direction, doubles his speed.

Thomas Merton describes those who never experience the gift of a contemplative life. His explanation for why some people never experience this can be found in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation: [T...

Are these hyperscheduled, overactive individuals really creating anything new? Are they guilty of passion in any way? Do they have a new vision for their government? For their community? Or for themse...

In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. … Psychiatrist Carl Jung once remarked, “Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.”

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Here is a spiritual peculiarity to explore: that eternity is what we crave, and the first thing our disillusioned brains think to do is cram it into the hours of the working week.

Many of us try to shove spiritual transformation into the nooks and crannies of a life that is already unmanageable, rather than being willing to arrange our life for what our heart most wants. We thi...

My guess is that for some of us, the “I’m busy” response is simply a badge we wear to portray an image of importance to each other. Maybe not consciously—some of us play the “I’m busy” card out of hab...

The truth, however, is that when we say yes to invitations that keep us compulsively busy, we may be exhibiting a lazy ambivalence that actually keeps us distracted from the invitations that matter mo...

He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out the plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.

Leaders can hold onto busyness like a weapon of protection.

Of course, speed has a role in the workplace. A deadline can focus the mind and spur us on to perform remarkable feats. The trouble is that many of us are permanently stuck in deadline mode, leaving l...

The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a wife, or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront. ...

We have the freedom to make choices that can lead to blessing and favor or painful consequences. Battling busyness requires me to take a look inside my heart to make sure that my choices align with my...

Dear Lord, We come to you this evening with great expectations. Expectations that your Son Jesus has been born, and that his life is a light for us and all people. We come with expectations that He c...

When we insist on doing too much, we are not only inflicting the damage of this choice on ourselves, we are sharing this damage with those we love the most.

The press of busyness is like a charm. Its power swells. . . . It reaches out seeking always to lay hold of ever-younger victims so that childhood or youth are scarcely allowed the quiet and the retir...

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.

My hurry is what often makes the yoke of life and ministry heavier than Jesus means it to be.

There is a price to pay for busyness and it’s usually steep. You show me a busy person and I’ll show you someone who is broken somewhere. They may be hiding it well, but busyness is often fuel by some...

Finally, everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes...

The greatest enemy of good thinking is busyness.