“Busy is a decision.”

So says the amazingly talented Debbie Millman, and I’ve been sitting with that idea ever since I heard it.

Of course busy isn’t a decision all the time, for every person. Probably not for the single parent working two jobs, desperate to make ends meet. And maybe not when your boss dumps something absolutely howlingly urgent on your desk.

But it’s worth investigating where and when busy is more of a decision than you think. Are you consistently able to show up on time and with enough energy to meet your commitments? Are you able to focus on a person or task long enough to respond generously and effectively? Do you start climbing the walls if you haven’t checked your email, calendar, or social networks in five minutes — or maybe just two?

All of these are symptomatic of something: lack of control, lack of responsibility, eagerness to please (regardless of efficacy).

If you’re reading this, you have some control over how you spend your time and attention. Spending them better on fewer tasks — mindfully rather than busily — is often the more generous option, both for you and for those you seek to serve.

Sharing is a permission relationship: when I share something with you, do I have permission to do that? And after I’ve shared it with you, what kind of permission have I given you as to what to do with it next?

We’re more familiar with the problem of oversharing in the form of that person who doesn’t know when to stop. This often happens when people don’t navigate context effectively: what you share with your friends, your partner, or your therapist is not completely appropriate to the workplace. That’s not to deny the reality of your experience, or its importance for how you show up in the workplace — but it is to say that you need to take responsibility for how you teach people what they need to know about you.

The other problem of oversharing is what happens afterward. When you share that much, do you mean to give everyone who listens permission to re-share what you’ve said? Do you want us to have this window into your life? And, for those of us on the receiving end, how are we supposed to make sense of this new information?

Openness, honesty, and trust are precious commodities. Be sure to earn and keep them in what you choose to share and how.

When we find something that works, we naturally want to scale it: make it bigger, apply it to different problems in different contexts.

Sometimes that’s a good idea. Doing more pushups (or eating fewer cookies) each day is likely to scale well.

But scale shouldn’t always be the goal. A technique that works in developed-world consulting might not fit a developing-country context. A “best practice” developed in one village might not work in the next valley over.

Helping ourselves and others to do more of what really works might be a good idea. But simply doing more of what we know how to do to other people might not be very helpful at all.

“[T]he day is long and the work is great and we’re not commanded to finish the work, but neither are we allowed to desist from it.”

— Arnold Eisen, quoting a favorite passage of his and Rabbi Heschel’s from the Talmud (via On Being)

***

Our modern culture doesn’t do well with the idea of joining a project in midstream, helping out as we can, and leaving before the work is complete.

We optimize, project-manage, and Get Things Done. We cross items off of our lists. We like completion. We like the credit that comes with it.

Our wisdom traditions know better. The world — and the work — existed before any of us got here, and they will exist long after we are gone.

“We’re not commanded to finish the work:” we don’t have to take projects so small as to ensure completion, regardless of efficacy. And we don’t have to ram big projects to completion, regardless of externalities or downstream harm.

“But neither are we allowed to desist from it:” complexity and compromise are facts of life, and can’t be used as excuses to hide from the work. Better to help advance the Sagrada Familia than to add a few more twigs to our own lean-to just because it is ours, or we can declare completion.

Perhaps great works are never really finished. Perhaps that’s part of what makes them great.

Perhaps we could give ourselves permission to begin — even and especially when we can’t finish the work alone.

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.

— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter From a Birmingham Jail“

***

Progress is never inevitable.

But now is the time, and this is the place, and we are the people.

We may none of us get all the way to the promised land — at least not in this life. We might not even get to the mountaintop, or be granted a look over.

But we can always take another step, lift another voice, make more real the promise of democracy.

Let us march on.

Yesterday, I listened to On Being‘s extraordinary 2015 interview with the dearly departed muse, Mary Oliver.

Among the many arresting observations she makes, one line that caught me up short was: “I saved my own life.”

We all have to do that at some point, don’t we? Even with all the help and advice and instruction in the world, no one else can take the saving step for us — into the woods, along the beach, onto the page.

It’s probably a healthy thing that our culture is learning to speak more openly of the struggles and traumas that have always been there. But we can’t descend totally into blaming others or shaming ourselves — “walk[ing] on [o]ur knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”

Sooner or later, we must address ourselves. And then, with all the support and grace and attention we can muster, save our own lives.

That’s how we claim the gifts we have to share.

***

We’ll miss you, Mary.

One of the basic tasks of any philosophy, and especially of any ethical system, is to determine and assign praise and blame.

It follows that we have to ask what is worthy of praise or blame, and what to do when confronted by circumstance — especially blameworthy actions.

One answer that seems especially popular these days is, “Who am I to judge?” After all, no one’s perfect, and right is relative.

It’s certainly true that no one’s perfect. And sometimes right is relative: are bigger or smaller houses inherently better or worse?

But both of those ideas can be pushed too far. Bigger houses probably aren’t inherently worse than smaller ones, for example, but it is objectively wrong to harm communities or habitats. “That house is too big” is a judgment of taste. “That big house uses too many resources and filled in the wetland” is a moral judgment about harm and blame.

So — who are you to judge? Possibly just the right person. Not judging might be letting yourself or the other person off of an uncomfortable but necessary hook. The trick, though, is to assign praise and blame effectively: by separating aesthetic judgments from ethical ones, and by judging actions and effects that really matter.

About a decade ago, I decided I would fulfill a dream by enrolling on a National Outdoor Leadership School field course. I spent the next six months preparing, then strapped a 60-pound pack on my back and headed out into the Wyoming wilderness with a team of 12 students and two instructors.

I learned many lessons during that month on the trail (you never know how much you’ll miss music till you go a month without iGadgets), but one that’s stuck with me forever comes from a short essay one of our instructors read to us after a big hamburger feed on our first night back in town after a month in the field.

It’s called “Briefing for Entry Into a More Harsh Environment,” and it’s been a touchstone for NOLS students since Morgan Hite wrote it in 1991. The essay lists 11 habits that are essential for survival in the wilderness, and urges students returning to the “frontcountry” to maintain them in a culture of distraction and interruption.

These 11 habits of mind boil down to living simply, challenging ourselves to keep learning, and taking care of people and things.

Those are good rules for any time and place, and Morgan correctly notes that it doesn’t take a month in the mountains to learn them.

But, as we all know, it’s also quite possible for the amount of stuff in the frontcountry to overwhelm the simple principles of survival in the wilderness. You don’t have to go all the way to Wyoming every time that happens, but it can be useful to take a hard look at our mental and physical “stuff” from time to time and determine how much we really need to be carrying.

“Enough” doesn’t always mean less, or lesser.

Sometimes, more is exactly the right answer:

• More quality
• More value
• More generosity
• More gratitude
• More abundance

Pick a few areas of life in which adding more might help you reach enough.

Then start enacting more and see what happens.

How much is enough?

How much do we really need?

It’s probably less than we think — especially when “enough” feels impossibly far away at the moment.

But here’s the thing: just like ethics, it’s important to think about “enough” before you bump up against the boundary.

Because if you start out just looking for more with no concept of what could be enough, it’s going to be hard to change the pattern long after the marginal returns have ceased to matter.