What are we busy with?

What are we busy with? We are always occupied with activities in our daily life, but what answer do we come up with when we ask ourselves, "What have I done in the last month, last year, last decade?" It is usually easy to come up with the things that we have done today but as we continue to think back, it becomes harder and harder to answer the question. Surely, we have succeeded in a few things and failed in a few other things, but after a certain amount of time, does it really matter? And if it doesn't matter, why aren't we busy doing things that DO matter?

With some analysis, we can see that it is our personal dramas that keep us busy. On the face of it, everyone is busy because they have "so many things to do". But when we start to look at these actions, we realize that for every experience that we go through, we tend to attach a personal melodrama to it. If somebody insults us, we will continue to think of ways to retort back; if someone angers us, we will boil in agony for days to come; if someone didn't live up to our expectations, we will often spend months in just trying to face the fact; similarly, if someone compliments us, we can easily bask in its glory for months. But what's the point of all this? If, in ten years, none of this is really going to matter, why bother with it? Action by itself doesn't take much time but when we add these extra dramas, we not only lose our valuable time but also our ability to really live through the experience.

If we learn to drop these dramas and accept situations as they are, we will understand our mental barriers and in overcoming them, we will develop the capacity to do more; meditation helps in doing just that. On their death beds, people often feel like they haven't done anything worthwhile in life and would wish that they had asked this question of themselves a lot earlier in life; for the rest of us, there is no better time than NOW.