Intention Over Busyness

Hello everyone!

I’m back with a blog post after a long hiatus. It’s been a busy couple of months and there have been some updates on my end.

One of my poems got published in an anthology recently. It has been a wonderful feeling to finally see my name in print in an ACTUAL book!

Here is the link to the Instagram post where I announced regarding the same.

This year is ending in a matter of a couple of weeks. I’ve been reminiscing and reflecting on all that has happened and all that I have learned this year.

One goal I had for this year was to prioritise being intentional above being busy. And this is what this blog post is all about.

At the beginning of the year, I read a pretty insightful book about slowing down, Take Your Time: The Wisdom of Slowing Down by Eknath Easwaran.

There is one habit I was extremely consistent with, in this regard. And that was to keep a record of all the books I had read along with the learnings from them in one place. I clearly remember writing down the goal of “reading with intention.” And this book seemed to be the ideal one to begin putting this theory into practice in my life.

One sentence from this book stood out for me. “It’s not enough to be busy. The question is, what are you busy about?”

Quite a deep thought worth thinking about.

On any given day, we tend to prioritise quantity over quality. From the standpoint of a reader, I notice a lot of people claiming to read 100-150-200 books every year. Certainly, a feat to be proud of!

But must I ask these people how much of what they read in these books do they remember? Probably not much.

This is why I chose to read lesser but higher quality books which would help me in gaining new insights.

And now at the end of the year, as I look through all the notes and highlights I have meticulously saved in my digital notebook, I feel extremely satisfied at the profound set of learning I have accumulated throughout the year.

The best part is that despite reading a lot lesser than the previous year, I have learnt significantly more than ever before. Choosing intentional reading over reading “x” number of books helped me to gain wisdom and new knowledge.

In the same way, I tried to apply the same philosophy to life in general. There have been a lot of times when I chose to work intentionally rather than work to seem busy.

I have loved the whole idea so much that I am carrying forward this as a general goal for the upcoming year. In fact, I have chosen “intention” as my word of the year for 2022.

People nowadays regard being “busy” all of the time to be an accomplishment. We refer to ourselves as “busy bees.” Not undermining the fact that busy people truly work very hard. But the fruits of being busy reflect when we choose what we want to be busy about.

Are we being busy trying to reach milestones? Or are we being busy just so that it looks like we are busy to the rest of the world?

I leave these questions here for you to answer to yourself.

Until next time, stay blessed!