I am by nature, or nurture, a lazy person. I’m not proud of this; in fact, I REALLY wish it were not so.
I’ve read that in Buddhism, there are three kinds of laziness. Now, I’m not a Buddhist, so I’m just taking someone’s word about this.
The first kind is regular laziness, where we procrastinate or avoid things because we are too tired or the task feels too daunting, or we just don’t want to work THAT hard.
Then there is the laziness of being too busy (what? How can you be busy and lazy at the same time??). This is when we give our prosaic chores – and we all know the list is never-ending – precedence over our true priorities. But what ARE my true priorities, you might ask. Good question. Important answer. It would be much easier to follow one’s calling if one could identify it in the first place. But I think that maybe that’s exactly where being too busy starts to be a problem, right at the beginning. If you are consumed with tasks at work and chores at home, and every time you finish one, you immediately look around to find the next thing that needs to be done, you never have a moment to open to that true calling, to let it show up. There needs to be space for the path to become visible, even if it’s not the whole path, but just the first step.
The third kind of laziness is that of becoming disheartened, a form of losing belief in oneself and the meaning or purpose of one’s existence. This often arises from allowing outside influences to impact your sense of self-worth. Hard not to do in our culture.
Setting aside regular laziness, which all people experience from time to time (except a rare few, and they are not my friends), it’s interesting to think about how the other two forms intertwine. We live in a world that prizes being busy; saying you are “crazy-busy” has become almost a form of bragging. The state of being stressed is commonplace. The notion that being quiet equals being unproductive then requires us to relax busily- to engage in extreme sports or intense entertainment. However, this excludes the quiet time that allows for acts of creativity, the contemplation that leads to self-knowledge, and the deep connections that require time to develop. And so this busyness, this constant activity that fosters the illusion that we are doing something that matters, leads to a kind of disquiet. There is no landing-place. We become disconnected from our sense of purpose, or never have a chance to explore what it might be in the first place. So we become disheartened and lose the energy it takes to find and connect with meaning. This is a really sad state to be in. I know, because I’ve been there. When one is disheartened, it’s difficult to say, “Okay, I’ll just stop being disheartened now.” In fact, the typical reaction is to beat yourself up, compare yourself to accomplished and/or famous people (usually people you’ve never even met and actually know absolutely nothing about… Albert Einstein! Princess Kate! David Hockney!!) and conclude that you are a total loser. Consumer culture, and all its attendant forms of media, are quite invested in helping you undermine your sense of self, but THAT’S a whole other kettle of fish. Anyway, if we were to PAUSE, it might go a long way toward allowing a sense of meaning to arise. And THAT would go a long way toward being heartened rather than disheartened. Which is one thing that you really can’t put on your To Do list.