Busy is Tired
Lofa Totua | She/Her
I’ve been busy (busy busy)
I’ve been fuckin’ busy. I’ve been busy thinking.
When I first heard ASAP Rocky’s ‘Purity’ back in 2018, the sample from Ms. Lauryn Hill herself hooked me in the face. Those days I used to self-isolate in my hall room voluntarily. Oh how times have changed.
I gotta find peace of mind.
Finding peace of mind is one of those concepts that you hear adults throw around in conversations growing up, pretending they know. You hear it on TV shows, movies, and from legit and not-so-legit artists at their live shows talkin bout “…the process in creating this helped me find peace of mind”.
Said I was in a rush but I was busy rushin.
I have punished myself, almost habitually, with burnout. How heroic. And stupid. It be like: keep going until I burn out, or burn something, or someone. Like many of us I have been conditioned to be productive from a young age, my life at capacity from sunrise to sundown. For my schooling years, it was all go. From Place A to Place B. Like the automated response of so many to ‘be more productive’ during this lockdown, my childhood was great, but it also nurtured habits grossly rooted in capitalism.
I gotta find peace of mind.
No one can teach you how to find peace or to feel gratitude. Some of you, like me, have tried to pray for it, but like many prayers, it doesn’t really work without following it up with action. Truly feeling it is something else.
Peace of mind is a privilege. Time off is a privilege. In these times, having a safe place to call home with good people is a privilege. There are people who can’t afford to ‘recover’ from burnout because they can’t afford to not work. There are people who can’t afford to ‘recover’ from burnout because they live paycheck to paycheck. There are people who can’t ‘recover’ from burnout because they can’t afford to change careers. Many of these jobs are the same jobs now considered essential to the running of our country.
I gotta find peace of mind.
The sample, “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind” is from Lauryn Hill’s MTV Unplugged album. It blew my mind and woke me up man. This was before being woke and open minded was cool. As an annoying fresher, my toxic trait was thinking I was woke enough to speak on things that did not concern me. This track was literally the first song I ever ugly cried to. In the comfort of my own self-isolation of course. I felt seen. I felt heard. More importantly, I felt understood.
Busy shit, busy this, busy that. I need a minute.
Around the time I was 13 years old, my grandfather and I were fighting similar demons. Life really had no meaning and no gain for me. It was a hard time to live in my head. I couldn’t go to school and last a day without being overwhelmed by unbearable migraines. After 3 years straight of being ‘productive’, a concussion injury forced me into my own self-isolation. Playing sport, which had become so much a part of my identity, had been taken away from me. I wasn’t allowed in certain places in case I fainted and I had to be careful all the time. My grandpa, on the other hand, had just been fired from his job of over 10 years working as a luggage loader at Auckland Airport. After decades of being the breadwinner, we as a family had to adjust to life with him at home all the time. Unlike me, he chose his self-isolation. Weeks and weeks saw him glued to the couch. Talking to him was a tumultuous experience and you never knew what version of him you were gonna get. It took me a while to understand, but for him, being productive—his job, being the provider for our household, things that had given him purpose—had also been taken from him.
This what that voice in your head says when you tryna get peace of mind.
By the time I turned 15, we—without discussion —had thrown ourselves into suffering under the sun. Gardening, running, training, cooking and everything else that made us feel like we were existing in the moment. I remember not thinking about where I was going later, or filling my head with lists and plans like I do these days, trying to use ‘busy’ as my distraction. It was in these moments that I no longer felt like I had no purpose. Instead, I learnt of the stability in being present and loyalty to one’s self. I think Papa felt the same, although we have never spoken about that time.
He says it’s impossible… but I know it’s possible.
When we take away the busy from our lives, what are we left with? When we are forced to remove the endless to-do list, what do we do? After burning out, who are we Aotearoa?
When you are confined to one space for a long period of time, you will be confronted with your worst self and the worst of the people around you—as many of us may or may not have found since our country went into lockdown. Face to face with the facts, toe to toe with your demons. The truth is, so many of us can no longer run to our various forms of escape as often as we would like or even at all because of this lockdown. We would rather burn out than face this truth. Being unavailable or too busy is no longer an excuse for us to work on ourselves. There’s no better time than to unpack and seek peace of mind than now. There’s no better time to reconsider: what is the ‘normal’ we want to return to? What is the system that we were serving before and why did it take all of this for us to just… breathe?
You make my heart desire pure, just tell me.
Media. Film. Music. Visual art. Feeling the sun on our skin. Exercising. Journaling. Reading for enjoyment. Spending time with our isolation buddies.
While we are participating in these activities and being present, the world is on pause. Life’s pile of shit to do is on pause.
But not for everyone. There are some amongst us who have to live with the realities of poverty, violence, and
illness—things that do not pause, things that cannot be escaped, burnout or no burnout, lockdown or no lockdown. There are some amongst us who have to continue to work outside our homes to support ourselves, our families, other people we are caring for and essentially, our country. If you are in a position of privilege to be asking yourself these questions then I encourage you to do so. For now, the burn out is far from your horizon. What can you do to support their peace of mind?
I’m undone because I share with you my peace.