Busyness

Everyone who knows me would agree that I am a total Urbanophile - cities excite and energise me. So it's a rare thing for me to be sat in a cabin in the woods, miles away from anything made of steel or concrete, far from the growl of traffic. But that's where I am right now (not miles away from Wifi thankfully!). Perhaps cities resonate with me because I'm wired as an activist - I'm a doer - the quintessential busy body. The busyness of the city permissions me to be busy too. But away from all that, who am I? Quietness and solitude beg deep questions of my identity apart from all my doing.

I've been reading a superb book called 'The Rest of God'. In it the author (

There is a terrible cost to our busyness. It erodes memory. Or worse than that, it turns good memory into mere nostalgia – memory falsified and petrified – and turns bad memory into bloodhounds that chase us to rend us, that keep us ever running, dodging, backtracking. Busyness destroys the time we need to remember well. In the confusion, we forget who we are. The broken pieces remain strewn.

 

The Swahili word for "white man" – mazungu – literally means "one who spins around." That's how East Africans see Westerners: turning ourselves dizzy, a great whirl of motion without direction. We're flurries of going nowhere. Sabbath time invites us to stop turning around and around. It invites us, among much else, to remember. And remembering - remembering well, without nostalgia or self-pity or bitterness, but in a way that reminds us of who we are.