Too busy-Not a tribute

A busy life today.Many people ,men, women and children talk of something like busy schedule.Father is busy with business. Mother is busy in the kitchen, scheduling the children's day to day programmes, take them to lot of extra curriuculars-music,dance, swimming, yoga and what not. Children are always in a hurry-busy in home work given by schools and tuition teachers,practice piano lessons, do maths with Abacus.Both parents/children have become addicts to this busy life and never accept anything to the contrary.

There is a lot of difference between how we were brought up and how our grandkids are being motivated.sons and daughters have absolutely no time even to talk with their old parents. Busy--busy--busy--.Is it a tribute or shortcoming?

Definitely there seems to a problem,without realising which we are celebrating.My neighbour
boasted to me that she had not slept even for 3 hours for the past two weeks.Why rational people so irrational in their behaviour?
To be alive in this world of competi tion is it a must to be affected by the stunning malady of'busy'ness.Are they affected or rather infected by it?It seems to be more of bubble of Real Estate Prime lending that shook the world 8 years back.

We are at the wrong path of over valuing certain aspects of life like education, sports, Fine arts etc unconnected to the reality.In the world of communication , we are aware of what everyone else is doing more than what we should do.An unhealthy competition totally unsuited to the skill sets prevails.When we engage ourselves in having all, doing all and achieving all--all become nothing in no time.

Any day this 'too busy', too much involvement is the undisciplined pursuit of MORE,MORE, MORE leading nowhere.Success never means becoming a superman/super woman.
Setting very high expectation, building peer pressure make the children stressful and depressed.
Everyone has started quoting Erricson of the deliberate practice which invariably brings success.The 10,000 hours of practice has gone into the heads of everybody to make son/daighter the best performer in the field without realising what'deliberate practice' means.Is it just an hourbased target?Deliberate practice does not mean 24 hrs busy, but a calculated practice with frequent self assessment, rectification techniques intermitted by 8 hrs sleep a day.

Parents in their high ambitions fix unrealisable targets that keep the parents and children very very busy-definitely not a tribute to either.

It is high time that we stop being too busy, fix the essentials and eliminate the unwanted.Create free zones for themselves and children.Just remove the clutter,focus only on essentials.Overstuffed lives may be made lighter and easier to enable concentration on things that really matter. If not now, never.
We may regret having disregarded a handful of valuable things and having wasted precious hrs in trivial things that do not matter at all.

It has been dinned into our ears that" fortune taps at our door only once and make the hay while sun shines/'
These sayings are not always applicable, We should be able to say 'no' to certain good opportunities and create space for ourselves to decide the essentials.
This may look counter intuitive to go against the popular 'ever busy' slogan.
But the remedy for the crisis is to desist bragging about the " I am too busy' mentality ,desist from MORE and MORE turn towards the more constrcutive , more disciplined 'LESS' and 'BETTER'

Jayasala 42

Too busy-Not a tribute