Life gets busy, I can certainly attest to that. As I inhale cold mountain air and pull the binoculars from my eyes, I wonder how I allowed it to come to this.

Busy.

Busy is a thief in the night that sneaks into your home and whispers into your sleeping ear, “Keep filling your days with stuff.” He refuses to define stuff, but you start to feel drawn towards it.

At first you ignore, you’re a child. You seek the immediate, the now. Yesterday is too far gone to remember and the future isn’t even a blip in your radar.

But the whispers don’t stop.

Time goes on and it starts to take hold. Like a rock perched under a waterfall, it holds on to every grain as long as it can, but the outcome from persistence is inevitable. You erode, you subconsciously obey. Beyond all reason and warning signals from your brain to abort this unending cycle, you press on. Busy is good, busy progress, busy is what is expected of us.

We’re told to “hammer”, to “grind” to keep pushing forward. We become something we never intended. We become busy for the sake of being busy. We fill our days with nonsense, we fill our days with filler.

Over time we willingly give up control if only to make the whispers stop. We forget that we are the masters of our short time on this hunk of rock. We settle in for the rollercoaster ride, allowing life to show us the ups and downs, but never realizing there are other other options besides the track we are riding on.

All you have to do is hit the brakes and step off.

But that never occurs to us. Stay the course, it's easier this way.

The mountain air leaves my lungs and I realize I have things to do. I’m not completely clear on what these things are, but I feel the pull towards them. I heft my backpack on and make my way back to civilization, back to busy.

// Fred Bohm