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People convince themselves they are important and worthwhile because they’re busy. It’s a modern problem: Everyone is rushing around but few are doing what they really want to.
Many people spend their lives hurrying about pleasing their boss or family but rarely themselves. They spend their lives racing, but however fast they go, they never seem to achieve anything.
It’s a 21st century problem. Or is it?
“So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…Life is long if you know how to use it," wrote Roman philosopher Seneca in his book On the Shortness of Life, written 2,000 years ago. It could have been written yesterday.
In modern life, busyness is a distraction from living. Many dutifully fulfill their obligations but fail to do anything truly worthwhile. Ancient Romans suffered exactly the same problem.
Seneca berates us for failing to see time as a valuable commodity. We value objects but squander our most valuable possession. He could be talking about contemporary life when he says, “For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.”
Busyness is as an addiction that prevents us from truly being ourselves, he believes. “No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied…since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.”
Seneca could be speaking directly to us: “Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who…organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day."
It seems the world of ancient Rome and the modern city are identical in their ability to distract us from what we should really be doing—living our own lives in our own way.
Rod Judkins is an artist, writer and professional public speaker, delivering lectures and workshops that explain the creative process and help individuals and businesses to be more inspired in their lives and work. His new book The Art of Thinking Creatively is published in April. He is author of the international bestseller, Change Your Mind: 57 Ways to Unlock Your Creative Self.
