My friend Sarah and I had a discussion this morning about being busy. We laughed at our old childless selves who thought they were sometimes busy. Then we laughed at our old selves with only one kid who thought they were busy. Then Sarah most likely went on to laugh at her old self with two kids who thought she was busy, but nicely kept that to herself. (Actually this was a post I started many months ago, now Sarah’s got the four kid perspective! I’d ask her if she’s laughing at her old self but when I saw her I wasn’t allowed to make her laugh. It was still too soon after the new arrival to laugh without pain so I’ll check that one out later!)

Our point: it’s all a matter of perspective.

Yet now that we have left the college years and the video game playing, beer drinking, I order pizza ’cause I’m too lazy to get off the couch and I know it, guys behind us, everyone thinks they are busy. And I, for one, think we all are. As a rule (except for the aforementioned college guys) I believe we all like to keep ourselves busy. We all fill our days with activities that have meaning in our lives. Some activities are chosen, and some are necessary but who would actually want a life that entailed sitting around on a couch all day playing games, drinking beer and eating pizza?

Whups! Sorry, not sure how my hand ended up in the air just now.

But joking aside why is it that we all (myself included) feel the need to compare our levels of busyness?  The reality is that very few of us fill our day’s in the same way, and what may look like work to one looks like play to another. (I’ll trade you a half hour commute for a half hour of laying on the floor making horses talk!)

So I’ve got two ideas to solve this- I’m busier than you-  problem. Either, we all shut up about it (exceedingly unlikely I know) OR someone comes up with some sort of busyness standard. Then we can all plug our info into the chart and say, “See I am really busy!” or “Dang, I’ve got so much spare time I should take up basket weaving!”

On second thought, a busyness standard sounds a lot like something that would require a government committee to spend millions of dollars to come up with some sort of standard none of us actually need anyway and then try to prove their worth to the public by attempting to pass ridiculous laws that would make sure no one was ever too busy. Then if we decided we had had enough of that and attempted to fire them all they’d  complain that we were killing jobs.

So, forget that busyness standard.

We are all busy.  Get over it.