Doing versus Being

There are so many of us that pride ourselves in being busy. We look up to people who seem to be juggling the world because they seem more important than those who aren’t. It seems that the expectation is that the more hectic people’s lives are the better they are doing. And the busier they are the more successful they are.

Or perhaps it’s that the busier we are the better we feel about ourselves? We feel like when we are doing something then we are achieving but not so much when we are just being. When people constantly talk about how hectic their lives are there seems to be a sense of fulfilment in that for them but in the same breath they look tired and unhappy.

It’s the same with talking. We struggle to just be quiet, and we always need to be saying something. Talking fills gaps, it distracts us from our thoughts, we feel less alone and we also get the attention we want.

We talk to get acknowledged and to be heard and we talk to connect with others. When we are quiet we have to acknowledge ourselves, we have to listen to ourselves, we have to hear our own thoughts and we have to connect with ourselves. It’s a difficult thing to be just be in the now moment even to clear our minds of thoughts and just enjoy looking at something or sitting somewhere with nothing to DO but with everything to BE.

When we are quiet, we can finally see how we talk to ourselves. What do we say to ourselves? What do we believe to be true? But how long do we actually allow ourselves to hear these thoughts before we find a distraction.

I am really inspired by people who have gone to an ashram or even just done it themselves, people who have not spoken for a certain amount of days. Imagine how you get to know yourself, imagine how familiar you become with your thoughts, and how you are almost forced to learn how to clear your mind because suddenly there are no distractions and you realise that you don’t want to be stuck with your negative thoughts any longer.  

I believe that success takes on another dimension when we are able to be with ourselves, to be quiet for a while, to not find the next thing to do but rather find the chance to just be. Even if this is with people or alone, we can still just be.  I get that our lives are actually really busy but many people will keep doing things to keep busy even in their free time.

If you ask two different people what they do with their lives and one answers that they have been busy with work, friends, family etc and the other answers that they sat meditating all week (for example), let’s be honest we would think the meditating person is a bit strange and we would wonder why they don’t have something to do? Or didn’t they get bored and lonely? And our immediate thought is that this person doesn’t DO anything.

Babies know how to just be because that’s all they know. It’s the one time in our lives that we are allowed to just be and no one judges us for it. Until we grow up and suddenly being is not good enough, now we must get up and do do do! And we are not taught to find a balance of being and doing.

Many of us were not taught growing up that it’s so important to just be. I see this so often that when parents talk about their children they describe the success of their children by how busy they are in terms of their profession/school/sports etc. Imagine a parent bragging and saying that their child has decided not to work and do "nothing" for a while? What if the parent would brag about who their child is, and not what they do? But would that be good enough?

Success in society is based on what you have to show for yourself on the exterior not on how happy or content you are.  Cildren are praised for how well they do not thier ability to be or who they are. So they grow up thinking that to feel good about themselves they need to be doing something with thier lives and there is no focus on their internal world because all the focus is on what they are doing on the outside. And so we grow up in this constant rat race of believing that in order to be somebody, we have to always be doing something.  

Just being can feel really uncomfortable and often we will feel guilty for doing nothing, but it’s not nothing, it’s just not doing. It’s in the being that we begin to really know ourselves. It’s in the being that we get messages and signs about our lives. It’s in the quietness that we find the peace we really crave; it’s in the nothingness that we find everything we have been looking for. Where we find all those things we have not found while we are doing and trying. It’s in the being that we find the connection to God or the universe and to ourselves.