Are You Truly Busy? - A Heartfelt Follow Up
The road to our dreams has many detours.
— Kurt Warner
When I send out my articles, I often reflect on how I could have written them better - after they have hit the streets. Maybe some of you do the same with even the most carefully crafted emails and notes. I am sure we have all done that with a conversation!
My recent post on being busy has been one I have really thought about.
I hope my message didn't make some of you feel like "busy" is something you can always control.
Because we can't.
My goal was to impart some thoughts about how to mitigate in ways you may not have considered. I received several fun replies, none of which said I made them feel judged about feeling "busy," so I think the way I wanted the thoughts to be expressed came across as intended. But I wanted to follow up with you if you are busy beyond your control, as we all truly are at times, to let you know that
I see you, feel you, and have been you.
I have the utmost compassion and empathy if you are at a life stage where there is simply nothing you can do to lessen the commitments you have that make your life busy. This is especially poignant since most of you are accounting professionals, many of who do personal and corporate taxes, with a tight season and employees to pay. You simply can’t walk away from that. And, some of you may be in the stage where you have dependents; perhaps you are even the filling in a dependent sandwich.
I was on my own (literally on my own, no alternate weekends and Wednesdays off) with two young twerps for the better part of seven years while in a business I loved. Work was demanding, and I commuted 2 hours daily* (uphill, through the snow, barefoot...). As the minis grew, they participated in all the usual things - friend and school activities, music lessons, sports, volunteering...), and I was the chauffeur, coach and head cheerleader. The youngest is thirty now, so we ran around together at an age without much connectivity in the arenas, music halls, or on the ski hills. That made it wonderful to connect with all the families around us, but it posed issues with keeping up with some other todos. So, I was busy! With no way to mitigate it.
Fast-forward to today. I am 62 years old with no dependents—my life is my own, and I can do as I please with my time.
75% of the reason I still work is that I feel invigorated**. We are not wealthy by any means (we are the middlest of the middle class), but we were able to save for these later years because we have lived a pretty simple life and grew up in a time when it was easier to save. College and University were more affordable; if you had a part-time job, you probably didn’t need to go into debt to get through. Housing was way cheaper, so you could invest younger and build equity. Working through Maslow’s Hierarchy took a much smaller portion of your income. So here I am, choosing to work part-time and mostly doing things I love.
I tell you this because I want to be very clear that my last post was intended to help with the parts of being “busy” that you can control, not to make you feel judged about the parts you can’t. And to give you a little hope that, at some point, you will likely be able to claim your life back as your own, even if it doesn’t feel like the end is in sight now.
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*Because of my commute and the unpredictability of traffic (we didn’t have Waze in those daze), the honest-to-goodness biggest stress I felt for years was being the last one to pick my kids up from daycare. Anyone feeling me on this?
**I have been trying to come up with an adjective for my why for a bit now, thanks to a long-time GF who used this word to describe it last night at dinner.
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