It’s really important to be careful and attentive to how much one gets swept up into the busyness. Those are two different things — actually doing something and the frantic, busy, scattered energy that you bring to the task. Try to watch and reflect on the feeling behind what you’re doing. What is the energy behind it? Recognize where the feeling of agitation comes from. So much depends upon staying with the breathing — breathing into the activity of what we’re doing. Sometimes it helps to step back and slow down, because often less gets accomplished the more frantic you become, in terms of actual physical accomplishment, as well as in your sense of enjoyment and harmony with others. Often it’s more the attitude that we carry that’s problematic because you can only do one thing at a time, anyway. We carry around in our minds all the things we think we have to do and that stirs up this frantic energy. So just breathe into what we are doing, be with it, not getting too swept up. Make the breath a force for settling.
Ajahn Pasanno, Breathe into busy activity
