You know when you ask people how they’ve been or how their day is going and their answer is almost always the same. Busy. I feel like I hear this word over and over again. Every time I ask, I know I will get the same answer. Busy. My life is busy. And while I realize we all have things going in our lives, schedules to keep, commitments to commit to, I also believe that we really aren’t THAT busy. I’ve thought about this a lot lately as I’ve been feeling rather run down from my daily grind. And as I was responding to an email early this evening with the word busy to describe my week, I became disgusted with myself.

I hate that word, busy. I feel like it is a cop out to avoid the things you really should be doing.

For example, I set myself up for failure earlier last month when I decided to take on a 40 day blog challenge. And as you can see, I’ve failed. I kept putting it off while thinking of ways to explain why I completely blew off something that I wanted to work hard at to accomplish. The only word I could come up with was…busy.

Sometimes I wish we would slow down for a few moments, unwind as the experts would tell us to do. Last night I walked around outside after getting home and took time to appreciate the moon that was glowing in the sky. And then, I tweeted about it. Tonight, I’ve found myself enjoying the silence, only listening to my key strokes as I type my thoughts to all of you. And suddenly, I don’t feel so busy anymore.

Think about how this applies to kindness…this thought of being busy. We’re too busy to hold the door for someone, or too busy to let someone go ahead of us in line even though they have fewer items than us, too busy to care about the feelings of others as we say whatever we thinking without fully caring about how the recipient of that message may feel. We pack our agendas full with meetings, coffee dates, classes, work, errands, etc. that we quickly forget to slow it down a bit and keep things in perspective. Lately I have found that I’ve lost sight of the slowing it down theory and rather, have tried to push my way through situations while most likely, stepping on some toes along the way. And so, it’s always good for a little reality check to bring awareness.

Slow it down. Stop using the excuse of busy. Do things for others and do things that benefit YOU.