My phone buzzed forty-seven times today. I counted.
Emails. Messages. Notifications. Calendar reminders. Three video calls happened at once. My coffee went cold on the desk. I forgot to drink it. Again.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, a thought came. A small, quiet thought. What I really wanted was to sit by a window and watch dust float in sunlight.
That’s all. Nothing productive. Nothing urgent. Just sitting. Watching. Being.
I didn’t do it, of course. There was no time. There’s never time.
This is the disease of our age. We are addicted to busyness. Not because we love it. Because we’re afraid of what happens when it stops.
I realized this last week. I had thirty free minutes. Unexpected. A meeting got cancelled. I didn’t know what to do. The emptiness felt wrong. Dangerous. I picked up my phone immediately. Scrolled through nothing. Just to feel busy again.
What was I afraid of?
I think I was afraid of silence. Afraid of being alone with my thoughts. Afraid that if I stopped moving, I would have to feel things I’ve been avoiding.
Busyness is a hiding place. A very good one. When every minute is scheduled, there’s no room for difficult questions. No space for uncomfortable feelings. The calendar becomes a wall between me and myself.
I know people who book meetings just to have meetings. The agenda is empty but the time is full. They feel productive. They feel important. They feel safe from the terrifying possibility of having nothing to do.
I am one of those people. I’m ashamed to admit it.
My grandmother never understood this. When I visited her, she would sit for hours doing nothing I could identify. Just sitting. Thinking. Watching birds. Breathing.
“Aren’t you bored?” I asked once.
She looked at me like I was crazy. “Bored of what? I’m alive.”
I didn’t understand then. I’m starting to understand now.
We have made emptiness illegal. Every moment must be optimized. Every second must produce something. We measure our worth by our busyness. The busier we are, the more important we must be.
But this is a lie. A beautiful, convincing lie that we tell ourselves while our souls starve for silence.
The best ideas I ever had came during empty moments. In the shower. Walking without destination. Lying in bed before sleep. These ideas didn’t come because I was trying. They came because I wasn’t.
The mind needs space. Like a garden needs fallow time. You can’t plant every inch, every season. Something has to rest. Something has to be left alone.
We don’t leave anything alone anymore. We optimize our rest. We schedule our relaxation. We productivity-hack our meditation. Even our emptiness has become a task to complete.
Social media made it worse. Now we can be busy even when we’re not doing anything. The scroll fills time without filling the soul. We feel occupied but accomplishing nothing. The worst of both worlds.
I deleted Instagram last month. For three days, I kept reaching for my phone. My thumb moved to where the app used to be. Muscle memory of addiction. The emptiness felt unbearable.
Then something changed.
On day four, I noticed the light. How it changed through my window during the afternoon. Golden at three. Gray by five. I had lived in this apartment for two years. I had never noticed this before.
On day five, I had a thought. A complete thought. One that started somewhere and ended somewhere else without interruption. This felt like a miracle. When did I last think a thought all the way through?
On day six, I reinstalled the app. I wasn’t ready for that much quiet. The fear won.
But I learned something. The emptiness I was avoiding was not empty at all. It was full of things I had been too busy to see. The light. The thoughts. The simple fact of being alive in a body that breathes and feels and exists.
We crave silence because we have made it impossible. Like a starving person dreams of bread. The hunger grows because we never feed it.
My friend Kabir works sixteen hours a day. He’s very successful. He’s also miserable. He can’t sit still. Can’t eat a meal without checking his phone. Can’t have a conversation without his eyes drifting to his watch.
“I’ll rest when I’m dead,” he says.
I think he’s already partly dead. The part that knows how to be still. The part that can watch dust float in sunlight and feel that this is enough.
I don’t want to be like him. But I’m becoming like him. We all are.
The world rewards busyness. Promotions go to people who are always available. Respect goes to people who are always busy. We perform our importance through our schedules. Empty calendars mean empty lives. Or so we believe.
But what if the opposite is true? What if the fullest lives are the ones with the most space in them? What if the richest moments are the ones where nothing is happening at all?
I tried something yesterday. I set a timer for ten minutes. I sat by the window. I did nothing. No phone. No book. No music. Just sitting.
The first two minutes were torture. My hands didn’t know where to go. My mind raced. This is wasting time, it screamed. Do something. Anything.
But I stayed. And somewhere around minute five, something shifted. The racing slowed. The panic faded. I heard birds. I felt my own breathing. I noticed my heartbeat.
For a few minutes, I was just alive. Not productive. Not busy. Not important. Just alive.
It was the best I’d felt in weeks.
The timer went off. I went back to my emails. The world resumed its demands. But something had changed. I had tasted the silence. I wanted more.
Maybe this is how we heal. Not by quitting everything. Not by moving to a mountain. Just by stealing small moments of nothing. Protecting them. Honoring them.
The emptiness is not our enemy. It’s our home. The place we return to when we remember who we are beneath all the doing.
Tonight, I will try again. Ten minutes of nothing. Maybe fifteen.
The emails will wait. The notifications will wait. The world will survive without my attention for a few minutes.
And I will sit by the window. Watch the light change. Listen to silence.
It’s not much. But it’s a start.
The dust will float in the sunlight. And for once, I will be there to see it.