I Don’t Want To Rush My Life

I’m just tired of being productive

Reading a book! The Will of the Many, by James Islington

I value my ability to do less. To relax without feeling like I’m wasting time. To take a break — a day, a week — to let myself be. I’m getting better at saying I’ve done enough today.

Is it laziness? I don’t know, man. I’m just tired of feeling like I’m doing something wrong if I haven’t spent every hour of my day “productively.”

There’s a paradigm in our modern culture that says productivity is good, being unproductive — i.e. laziness — is bad. But what does productive mean? Accomplishment? Checking items off of a to-do list?

Maybe productivity is just a distraction. And I get it. Getting things done is satisfying. It makes us feel good, like we’re worth something.

Yet the doing is to help us feel something inside, isn’t it?

We want to feel okay in there. We want to be happy. So we strive and strive, never giving ourselves a second to pause, take a breath and ask, what am I afraid of?

We’re running from ourselves.

We wouldn’t need to do so much if we were content meandering through the garden of our mind. But it’s scary in there. There are snakes, shadows, monsters. But if we just sit and we breathe and we face what’s going on inside, we may realize that it’s…