Is Your Life Busy or Full?
July 27th, 2012
A busy life describes a life that feels as if our life is at or over capacity. When we’re busy, we are often overwhelmed and over-scheduled. It doesn’t feel like we own our time. Our days are full of things we “have” to do. We feel like a victim of our circumstances.
Hi there.
A full life is rich. It may or may not be “full,” but it feels full. It is a fulfilling life, one in which we choose many of the things that are in it.
A busy life is a life where we spend our time.
A full life — our epic life — is a life where we experience, or invest, our time.
I think this is a good challenge — to create, and live, a full life rather than a busy life. I am glad we are at choice and have the power to say yes, and to say no, and to create boundaries.
These abilities are necessary when it comes to creating our best life. After all, we cannot “get back” time that has passed.
Today, as you do things, and time passes, check in with yourself by asking, “Am I spending this time, experiencing this time, or investing this time?”
A book that I revisit often is Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life. Seneca writes: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.
One strategy I try hard not just to say to myself several times throughout each day but to actually try to believe is “I will live today as if I will die tomorrow.” As long you’re serious about the intention, it is a sound strategy for not wasting time, and for being more present.
- Categories: Life and Leadership
- Tags: best life, busy, fulfillment, full life, one life, time
- Comments: 2 Comments
