Lately I have come across three articles in one week about being busy as a disease, in three different magazines. From all of them, I see that this "busyness" is not just about continual movement and doing several things at once, as in multi-tasking,
but about a particular chemical that gets released in the brain - dopamine - when a sense of satisfaction from completed tasks rushes through the bloodstream. This is no longer psychological but chemical. And - like any addiction - it takes deliberate attention
and focused presence to actually stop and be flooded with the chemical feeling of drivenness without continuing to "do." It takes coming into the present to stop the momentum, but even that is not easy to do.
The Chinese character for "busy", shown
here, is a combination of two characters: one for heart and one for death. Yes - "heart-death." Read that sentence again. I will be writing more about this here, for I am struggling with it myself, now that sabbatical is over and work is beginning again.