I feel like a cranky grandma right now.  The other morning I found myself in my garden getting mad at insects and waving at drivers to slow down on my street.

I can’t be serious? Who am I?! I become a faculty member and suddenly I’m 80? (I might be in this pic)

I am starting to understand why my grandpa watched golf all day.  It was his meditation and escape.  His dream life on screen and his naptime all wrapped up with the lullaby of shushed applause and the melodic “ooohs and awwws” cooing away all that is wrong in the world. Even the speeding cars.

There is the occasional, “What the crap kind of ball is that?” But then it would switch to another player and life would go on.  It is like a person having a bad dream, only to roll over and drift off again.  

My grandparents weren’t busy.  They read the paper, drank coffee and golfed. A lot.

Today I can’t escape busyness.  Even in the past two weeks, where work has slowed and the normal 9 to 5 ceases, I still have classes to plan and meetings to attend.  However, there are these times of lull.  Times where I am tempted to turn on the TV or watch the free episodes of Barefoot Contessa on Hulu.  Times where I want to check out.  I look at a picture on Facebook and suddenly an hour has gone by.  It's not that I never do those things, but I'm just not sure how so much time is gone by doing them.

Summer is disappearing and I am letting it.  I’m beginning to think this of life too.  I was raised in a family that thought, “Once you’re old enough, you’ll understand.”  Somehow though, I am always 12.  I’m almost 2 decades older than that, but I got lodged in my father and older brothers’ memories as a struggling adolescent, and I’m wedged there between their 80’s mullets and my dad’s memorable but awkward mustache.  They have moved on (and shaved), but somehow I did not in their minds.

Something clicked the other day though.  I realized that this life, the one you get to when you’re 80, if you get that far, is built on all of these other years.  You don’t turn into someone else when you’re 80.  You might mature, change, develop and grow, but at no point do you get to turn in the lease and try another life on.  This is it.

 To live an intentional life is something I am called to.  I am called to be out there with my pumpkins, tending to the mildew, watering my neighbor’s yard while he’s away and being in my office trying to think of creative ways to engage students.  I am supposed to be “busy.”  The issue is I’m not living my life trying to be busy because I can’t think of another way.  My life is full, and I appreciate it.  The full, embodied life is one that I wish more people knew about, learned about and loved.  Instead I hear more, “I’m busy”s and “I’m tired/exhausted/in need of a vacation,” than ever before. 

It’s costing us something because the busyness is about emptying and surviving not intentionally thriving.  That comes with a cost, a cost of switching professions, of telling your boss you need a break, one that might not come with pay, of going to therapy with your spouse, of not always getting what you want but rather letting the intentionality slow you down to realize what do you actually need? The excuse of busyness is going to be the loss of my generation.

I realized this last night when I had spent a little too much time online and shaken my fist at another car.  I was mad at myself for letting those things consume me… the emotion of being busy cost me precious time I couldn’t get back.  It gives me something to talk about though – the speeding cars, the deficit talks, so and so’s vacation last week… will this matter when I’m 80? 

So I did something rebellious to reclaim my day – I picked up a book. I read. And I plan on reading more and watching the news less.  I plan on pausing to do the prayer of examen more because inside of me there is Wisdom that is silenced much too often that no amount of golf, Ina Garten, or Facebook can tap into. That’s hard. It comes at a cost of not knowing what happens with the debt crisis or what’s happening in Africa.  But somehow it makes me show up to my needs and what is happening in my community more.

My friend Jenny is reading a book right now about compassion and she said, “He [the author] says that you can’t know compassion unless you live it out in a community. Someone who just watches the news and isn’t connected can feel things, but it’s altruistic because compassion causes you to act and stay involved.”  I can’t do that when my life is dictated by the news.  There is too much busyness to shut me down, tune me out, and I go out and yell at speeding cars because that is what ends up mattering.  There are things that matter to me more, I just have to spend enough time with myself to figure that out.   

So I head back up to my office now to engage with more books and more people in my community to find out how we can continue to stir compassion in ourselves and in our neighborhoods. Because that is how I really want to spend my summer and my following seasons. Maybe then I will have a lemonade stand when I’m 80 and invite the cars to not just slow down, but stop and be my friend.

Book Picture - Megan Lundgren Other Pictures - Kristin Ritzau (do not use without permission)