Busy eating, cleaning, checking their email.....

We're walking to the park.

"Does your mom ever take you to the park when she has time?" I ask my oldest charge [who has proudly lived eight-and-a-half years!].

"Naw," he responds, dragging the toe of his shoe on the sidewalk as he shuffles along. "My whole live, actually, my parents never really've got 'spare time.' They're always busy."

"Really?"

"Yeah!" the second-oldest pipes in [and she is at the grand age of four-years-and-one-month, in case you were wondering]. "'I'm busy.' Busy eating, busy checking their email," [the term checking their email is spoken in a hushed term, as though it has not exactly been determined what the action of checking one's email actually is], busy working or busy cleaning."

'I'm busy': I'm guilty of those two words, to my parents and siblings.

For each offense, was I really busy --that is, performing a pressing duty-- or were their pleas for attention serving as a reminder of what I ought to be busy doing? And thus shoved me on course enough to really get busy?

It seems that I can squander time until someone else asks for some of it, and then whatever I should have been doing appears to be the most urgent matter in the world.

I don't want to fall into the rut --excuse me, I mean lifestyle-- of being 'busy': always having something other to do than pay attention to actual people and live actual life.

There. I've defined the offender and now I cannot commit the crime again unwittingly. I am no longer innocent.

I want to be one of those rare people that is never bored and always working on something, but that doesn't forge a lifestyle occupied entirely by the faux 'busy'-ness.

Have you noticed that kids live to live? You have to tear them away from their play to eat or sleep. They are never ready to flop into bed until they have exhausted and lived up every second of alertness in them.

I refuse to be busy. I vow to live.