If You Want to Get Something Done, Ask a Busy Person

My tennis coach in high school was highly neurotic. He believed in winning, winning winning and hitting your opponent with a tennis ball as hard as you could because it was unlikely they'd get it back over the net if you did. He had a 10+ year undefeated league championship team with 3 State wins in his division and he was the devil. But he did say to us once, "If you want to get something done, ask a busy person." For my own sanity, I've pretty much forgotten everything else he ever said to us but I've never forgotten that. It rings in my ears at the oddest times. I think it's because I see a lot of truth in it. A person who has a lot of free time probably isn't too gung ho about getting whatever you need done; they probably don't have a lot of fire under their butt. I sound terribly judgy- I know.

I'm pretty much not happy if I don't have a million things going on at once. Even when I have free time, I'm busy doing "free time" things- reading a book, making cookies, trying to "finish" reading magazines so that I can recycle them. I love and hate this compulsive need to be productive. It sounds totally neurotic...it kind of is.

In different epochs of my life, this drive, this need to be productive has been either really useful and effective in helping me towards my goals, or they've driven me and whatever boyfriend I had at the time completely insane because I could focus on nothing else but getting stuff done. And this drive to push forward, to check things off lists and get them off the radar, it makes me wonder about not only what I'm running towards but what I'm running from. I mean, anyone who has this distinctive goal driven orientation is leaving something in their wake, right? When it's no longer about the process but the completion, when you forget what the movie was about but only that you watched it, then what's the point?

As I'm entering another really busy period of my life, I'm trying to re-examine this drive that's both served and hindered me. On the one hand, I'm so incredibly happy to bask in the glow of productive action, but on the other, I want to make sure that I'm not just whizzing past things on my way to the finish line. Smell the roses and all of that. I like to think that I've grown up a little from high school, and that I'm learning to have some patience, and to look around me and enjoy the view a little (at least without checking off "Enjoy view" from my to-do list). At least for right now, I feel like my drive to do a lot of things come from the invigorating sense that life is just too short, that I'm trying to take advantage of the time that I have. Or maybe it's just an excuse for my insane behavior. Either way, I'm loving the action, and I'm getting a lot of stuff done.