busyness on Exhaustion

Our culture invites us to experience everything! If we fail to take advantage of it all, we think we are missing out. But honestly, the web of invitations we are called to navigate is massive and c...

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...

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...

Fear and restlessness kill more than do illnesses.

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.

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...

We know we need rest, but we can no longer see the value of rest as an end in itself; it is only worthwhile if it helps us recharge our batteries.

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...

Psychologists and mental health professionals are now talking about an epidemic of the modern world: “hurry sickness.” As in, they label it a disease. Here’s one definition: A behavior pattern chara...

They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.

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...

People in a hurry never have time for recovery. Their minds have little time to meditate and pray so that problems can be put in perspective. In short, people in our age are showing signs of physiolog...

Looking into his life and out to the wider world, Kenneth Gergen writes about The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, arguing that “social saturation brings with it a general lo...

The problem we face today needs very little time for its statement. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnigh...

It is a sprinting, squirting, shoving age.

Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day.

Rest has never been one of America’s greatest strengths. According to one study, only one in seven adults (14%) have set aside an entire day for the purpose of rest. For those who do set aside an enti...

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...

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

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 ...

Gratitude and wonder are squeezed out when our lives are packed full with busyness and responsibilities…There is simply no room, no time to notice. We experience God’s gifts when we pause long enough ...

More enslaving than our occupations, however, are our preoccupations. To be pre-occupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there. This is worrying in the more specific sense of the w...

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...

Have you ever heard the term "Haole" before? I first heard about it while picking up surfing in High School. I knew it wasn't exactly a positive label, but until recently I never knew wh...

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...

You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

We are hyperliving, skimming along on the surface of life.

In The Busy Christian’s Guide to Busyness , Tim Chester has come up with twelve diagnostic questions to determine if and how much we’ve become sick with “hurry sickness.” “Do you regularly work ...

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

This busy world will surge about you with the tread of restless feet and the throb of restless hearts. And little that you will do will seem to make a pause in the rush of things. But you may in Chris...