[The Princeton] Study (see yesterday’s post) offers an important clue about internal busyness. It’s rooted in an attitude about time. When the pace of work is intensified, as it is in modern industrial and post industrial societies, time is seen as a finite, ever-dwindling commodity. Because time sees scarce, people try to squeeze the maximum amount of productivity out of every minute. They tend to spend less time on things like meditation, contemplation and singing – activities that can’t be made increase the “yield” on the time invested in them. Even we…who supposedly have our eyes on the inner depths of life, often find ourselves living by the basic capitalist assumption that what we do needs to yield a quantifiable result. How many of us got interested in meditation when we read about University of Wisconsin studies that showed that people who meditate can increase activity in the “happiness” section of the brain? This assumption – that if we are going to spend time on something, it needs to produce a measurable yield – is one root of internal busyness.
Sally Kemption, Busyness plan
