The word busy in Japanese character looks like this:
忙
It’s a combination of two characters “leaning in” side by side.
The character on the left is 人 meaning a person and the character on the left is…
亡 … meaning “dying” … so it does not take a rocket scientist to decode this any further. The sign of losing one’s essence is when you are just busy busy busy.
That’s when I take a deep breath, stop – then turn inward to find (not lose, lol) myself.
There seems to be a general conditioning among us that unless you are busy, you are not a valuable important human being
based on a notion that doing lots of stuff and more you do lots of stuff is equated to your self-worth.
It’s a mindset ingrained in us… it would be nice to strike a balance.
It’s interesting to observe that someone who is very very busy is the one who gets asked to do even more – whereas there’s someone who is doing very little. The theory is that if you want to get something done, you ask the one who appears to be overloaded not someone who is not busy because? The one who is overloaded is the hard-working most capable one and the other one is just lazy and slow… REALLY? Our perceptions are sometimes so askew.