Calm, peaceful, slowed-down, reflective, grounded.

These are the words I recently entered into my journal.  I wrote them on the return trip after visiting my extended family in Arkansas.

It’s a long story of how each of them ended up building their lives in that beautiful place. Each time I return for a visit, I seem to depressurize in a way that both rejuvenates me and causes me to slow down.

This reminder of escaping (at least temporarily) from a harried life caused me to do some further reading on the subject.

One of my interesting finds was a post by Rod Judkins in Psychology Today. Judkins references a book written nearly 2000 years ago by the Roman philosopher Seneca.

It turns out that even 2,000 years ago people were prone to be “too busy” for their own good.  Judkins summarizes:

In modern life, busyness is a distraction from living. Many dutifully fulfill their obligations but fail to do anything truly worthwhile.

Ancient Romans suffered exactly the same problem. Seneca berates us for failing to see time as a valuable commodity. We value objects but squander our most valuable possession.

He could be talking about contemporary life when he says,

“For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left the harbor, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.”

Busyness is an addiction that prevents us from truly being ourselves.

Judkins later concludes:

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied…. Since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.

Seneca could be speaking directly to us: “Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present.

But the man who…organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day.”

For those of us who have a proclivity for living life as if we are contestants on the TV show The Amazing Race, this will be difficult advice to implement.

But, it’s worth the effort.  Slow down and ground yourself to the most important values and objectives you have identified for your life.  And then help others to do the same.

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