Mindless Busyness

I have been a bit busy these days. Shortly after I started worrying that my translation agency would not give me any more jobs, its agents started calling me... It always work like this and makes me feel some kind of mysterious connections among humans.

I usually love their first call. It sounds like salvation. I do their second and third in a week, too. These calls give me some confidence in my skills. But when they have jobs for me, they usually have a lot. So I will start feeling saturated before long.

Whenever I am too busy, I remember what a pastor told me twenty years ago in a catechism lesson. He showed me a Chinese character 忙 (máng) or "busy" and then broke the Character into two elements 忄(豎心旁 shùxīnpáng), the radical for "heart" (an altered form of "心" xīn) and 亡 (wáng) or "to die."

He said that being busy meant the death of heart so we sometimes had to put down everything and go back to God or our heart would perish. (I do not remember exactly when he said it but I guess it was a class about observance of Sabbath.) In a softer expression, being busy should be being mindless. This has just reminded me of a Korean expression "청신(精神)이 없다" (Cheongsin-i opta) or "I have no spirit" that means "I am busy."

Well, although I do not identify myself much as a Christian any longer, his words still work as a very good reminder. It allows me to close my eyes and take a moment of break so that I can keep in touch with my soul again. (Or my sweet anima, who manifests in the likeness of Sailor Mercury, used to kick my ass to give me horrible haemorrhoids... It was her second reminder.)

Interestingly enough, 忘 (wàng) the Chinese word for to "forget" is also made up of 亡 (wáng) and 心 (xīn) or heart. So forgetting also is the death of heart or being mindless... Anyway, we tend to forget things very easily when we are too busy. So we should be time to time to do nothing so that we can be in touch with our hearts...