To ‘be’ or to ‘busy bee’?

I’d like to invite you to pause for a minute.  Take a seat, take a deep breath, grab a coffee, or tea, a juice, or a water, and look outside.  Look at the sky, or a tree, a weed on the ground, or a hill in the distance.  Listen.  Is there rain, is there wind, are there birds calling out?  How long can you sit for?

It is incredibly hard to just ‘be’, right?

Not DO, just BE.

I’m an outlier on a LOT of things, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got some good company on this one.  I remember being on a stress leave and being challenged to do exactly that - or rather BE exactly that.  I distinctly remember putting my head on a tilt, squinting my eyes, pulling a very quizzical look and questioning, “Sorry, I don’t  think I get what you mean, and do what exactly?”

The concept of ‘not doing’ was so far out of my frame of reference that I truly had no idea how to process the words she was telling me, let alone how to act on them.  So, I sat with that advice and pondered on it (while, of course, doing the dishwasher, paying the bills, walking the dogs, or putting laundry away).

It’s not what we’re taught to do.  As far back as kindergarten, we’re already on a path to doing more, achieving more.  While I applaud any and all efforts to encourage learning and growth, it often seems more about ‘getting ahead’ than becoming wiser.  It reminds me of the story often attributed to John Lennon (without much proof he actually said it) that when replying to a teacher who asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he simply said “happy!”.  The legend suggests that the teacher replied, “You don’t understand the assignment”, to which Lennon retorted, “You don’t understand life”.

Whether a true story or just an urban legend, the message serves us well in terms of reconnecting with what life is about.  It’s poignant to consider what makes us happy as we commando crawl through another ‘Blue Monday’.  No gravestone that I have ever read said anything even close to...

Jane Doe

1934-2025

Owned 2 houses, a Mercedes, once owned a yacht, and leaves her surviving family a trust fund, shares in Apple, and no mortgage.

What we celebrate is who people ARE (loving mother, devoted daughter, dedicated musician…).  And last I checked, ‘are’ is part of the verb to ‘be’.  Doing is certainly part of how we show up in the world (hard-working doctor, tireless athlete, selfless volunteer), but so often ‘doing’ slides into slavery for ‘having’.  And ‘having’ becomes ‘wanting more’.  In fact, there’s evidence that as soon as you have $1, you rewire, and $1.4* precisely becomes the key to happiness.  Boom!  Welcome aboard the relentless hamster wheel.

So, as we write our goals for this week, list everything we need to do today, and make a plan for how we’re going to tackle it all, let’s maybe take a moment to ‘be’.

Let’s take 1 minute, 3 minutes, or 30 seconds to set aside everything demanded of us.  Truly pause.  Resist the urge to start tackling the next task or checking the mental list, and look at where you are, what is happening in this very moment.  What colour is the sky?  Which way are the clouds moving?  Are there any new leaves or flowers, or snow?

OK, I’m seeing the snow here has melted, so I need to wrap this up and do dog poop pick up because now I can’t unsee that, I don’t want to have a gross back yard, and I don’t want to be that kind of neighbour either!

Hmm, I might still need a bit more practice to be good at this.

*For the curious - The hedonic adaptation to money is measured at a 1:1.4 ratio according to Prof. Laurie Santos’s Yale Science of Happiness course.