After moving to North America over a decade ago, I realized being busy had some kind of badge for many people to be proud of. During my graduate studies, I heard a lot of phrases like “I am busy with this or that,” and “I am too busy right now to do anything else.” People were stressed. But I also sensed that the busier they were, the more important and worthy they seemed to be. I also bought into the norm at some point. I started packing my schedule and filling in all the blanks on my planner and feeling good about myself.
Whenever I went to my department on campus as a grad student, I also observed that many faculty members looked tired. As a matter of fact, whatever caused it, some were suffering from chronic back pains. And I also witnessed that multiple faculty members whom I had met inside and outside the institution passed away unexpectedly, which saddened me tremendously.
They were busy. No doubt. The tenure and promotion didn’t help faculty slow down. Neither did the neoliberal culture of the academy. At that time, I didn’t find the importance of self-care and slowing down discussed as much in higher education. I started questioning the seeming virtue of busyness and even wrote in my academic paper (Mayuzumi, 2006):
In this industrialized modern age, people are always rushing toward something. Being “busy” is sometimes a sign of status in North America. It seems that everybody is supposed to be occupied. I want to challenge this notion by looking at the Chinese and Japanese traditional wisdom in kanji, Chinese characters. 忙, which is “being busy” in Japanese, is a combination of two symbolic characters, 忄and 亡. The former means “spirit, soul, or heart,” and the latter means “being lost.” In other words, being busy means that the soul is lost. However, your soul must be alive and present to heal.
Below is a diagram that I created to demonstrate the wisdom embedded in the Chinese character.
There is no such official word, 不忙 (fu-boh), at least in Japanese. I made it up to deliver the essence of our blog with consciousness of not being busy but Being Lazy and Slowing Down.
Photo by Karina Carvalho on Unsplash