Striving Not To Be Busy

Rod Dreher over at Crunchy Con writes about how stress is taking its toll on his family. He talks about how even though their economic situation is sound and their lives relatively uncomplicated, his 33 year old wife has developed shingles. Shingles usually strikes older people, although in younger people, a prime culprit can be stress.

In particular, here's a portion that I found interesting. He speaks of a friend's friend's friend's friend (or something like that) who had won an incentive trip to the Caribbean, with other hard working people in her division:

The friend came back startled and even shaken by her encounter with workers in their 20s and 30s. All they could talk about was work. All they wanted to do was work. Their whole lives were built around the office, and career achievement, and working more hours to achieve more success at the office. And my friend's friend, who was in her late 40s, thought these young people were crazy.

(The emphasis is mine)

To me, that is a most unfortunate state of affairs. Perhaps if these people did not have families, this might be acceptable, somewhere in the universe. But if these people have families, their priorities are messed up. I am largely preaching to the choir here, I believe.

I despise being busy. It stresses me out, and I don't like stress (who does?). I make a concerted effort not to be busy. Others might be in a different season of life than us, but I love that we are in a situation where Harmony can be a housewife. It's less stress for both of us. On a typical afternoon/evening after work, I get home, we eat dinner, then we usually go outside together and talk about the garden, talk about her day (not much interesting stuff in my days, usually), talk about the dog, talk about life, etc. We'll end up back inside, where we don't do much. Sometimes we'll take a walk, go to the park, or take Luna to the dog park, but for the most part, we stay home. And we like it that way.

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I have noticed the trend in commercials to appeal to busy people. More and more, I hear commercials on the radio saying "If you're as busy as I am, you don't have time to X and Y, that's why Z is quick and easy!"
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I always found it a bit backward that while the most important earthly relationship is between husband and wife, typically the husband, wife, or both see their co-workers for longer periods of time each day. Don't you think that's backward too? Something's a bit inside-out about that, and unfortunately, my job is not one where I can telecommute. So this un-busy life we try to lead is one that, in a way, tries to compensate for the inside-outness. I imagine this feeling will only be strengthened when we have children.

I don't participate in any extracurricular activities at work. I'm not saying that it's wrong to be involved, but for myself and my family, it's not what we want right now. There are more important things and people in life than the leadership association or the quilting club. I don't really hang out with "the guys" or "the buddies" much, because 1) I have not really kept up with college friends, and 2) it's just more time away from my wife, unless she can come too. In the very early days of this blog, I wrote a post about lacking worldly ambition.

Of course, we make exceptions for church. We try to be at most church events, and we have somewhat made it a rule that if someone invites us out to lunch, we'll go. But I have been in a church which seemed to imply that idle time was SATAN's time. We had activities almost every day of the week. Many of these were officially voluntary, but if your attendance was inconsistent, someone would eventually question your commitment to God. The high level of stuff-to-do was fine for a single college student, but times have changed. I would have none of that now.

Does all this make us seem homebody-ish? Good, it should. I don't see what's wrong with being a homebody, if you define it as "a person who prefers pleasures and activities that center around the home." That's what we are striving for.