Unlearning Being Busy

Pawel Czerwinski

Back in March, I decided to take a 2-week break, after a year of staring at my phone screen every day - that’s where my beef with sleep started. But then it turned into an involuntary break for the rest of April, May, & parts of June.

Being in the ICU and visiting my brother, I found that there isn’t anything to do at the hospital except sit, pray, and hold on to hope. So my thoughts turned to what I had been doing before this whole wreck.

I became deeply uncomfortable with dedicating my time to being as busy as possible doing hard work towards my passions. As someone who hasn’t been so passionate and present my whole life as I have this past year - it’s strange to now think about it all differently.

I recently wrote a Twitter thread on why it’s critical to take breaks from what we love - not just what we feel stresses us out. Previously, I perceived stress to only come from unpleasant sources or work we have to do. But I learned, only after watching a loved one in the ICU, that what I enjoy is capable of breaking me down as anything else.

Because passion is spoken about mainly in fond terms, once you find it - it’s euphoric. It’s quite easy to go overboard with it. But that energy can quickly burn you out without proper boundaries in place.

With my unlearning journey, I have been talking about what I had to unlearn in such a short span and I mentioned it all mainly in the past tense. But this doesn't end, unlearning is lifelong. And that’s scary. I really don’t know the moral of this story, but I do know my relationship with time has to become intentional and unfilled at times, left to take up the air and flow.

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