Busy-ness and Love

I've been "too busy" to write here, it seems.  Does that sound familiar?

So many of us are so very busy.  And much of that busy-ness arises out of what we truly care about.  We care about doing well (and doing good) in our careers, about the volunteer activities we enter into that create healing and growth in our world, and we care about the fun and relaxation we plan for ourselves and others.  "There just aren't enough hours in the day," we say -- and then we check our smartphones and rush off to the next meeting, the next call, the next task to be checked off.  And we're never done; how often do we finish the day saying, "I had five things on my "must-do" list today and I could only do X many of them" . . . so we add on to the next day's list and go to bed already feeling the burden of tomorrow.

We even rush through or cancel creative activities that we know will feed our souls.  Even our recreation suffers; we work out in a sterile gym instead of going outside, or we take a speedy walk through the park (even though if we stood still and simply listened for a few moments, we'd hear and see some of the creatures who've been hiding while we're bustling through).  And so it goes with our meditations and prayer time; our goal-directed habits resist the call to wait, to just breathe without any agenda.  One of my teachers used to chuckle that he had a minister who would say during the service, "Now let us enter into the silence...." and almost immediately the choir would start singing -- beautifully, softly, but not, you know, silent.  Silence is so alien to us, isn't it?

A dear friend warned me yesterday about getting too busy, and she's so right - but how do I change?  What's the yardstick by which I measure the tasks that can go and those that stay?

This morning I read, "If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing."

What would it mean to simply live from one moment of love to the next?  I don't know, but I'm wondering.  Maybe if we opened ourselves up to that possibility more often, we'd have time to breathe.