Antidote to Busyness

I read the following passage from Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom. It spoke to me because, lately, I've been thinking about how to be more efficient in my work. His reminder is that there has to be much more to me than always responding to outside stimulus.

"You cannot go inwards if you are completely outward. Try an experiment and you will see, you will discover a number of other useful things on the way. Try to find a time to stay alone with yourself: shut the door and settle down in your room at a moment when you have nothing else to do. Say 'I am now with myself', and just sit with yourself. After an amazingly short time you will most likely feel bored. This teaches us one very useful thing. It gives us insight into the fact that if after ten minutes of being alone with ourselves we feel like that, it is no wonder that others should feel equally bored! Why is this so? It is so because we have so little to offer to our own selves as food for thought, for emotion and for life. If you watch your life carefully you will discover quite soon that we hardly ever live from within outwards; instead we respond to incitement, to excitement. In other words, we live by reflection, by reaction. Something happens and we respond, someone speaks and we answer. But when we are left without anything that stimulates us to think, speak or act, we realise that there is very little in us that will prompt us to action in any direction at all. This is really a very dramatic discovery. We are completely empty, we do not act from within ourselves but accept as our life a life which is actually fed in from outside; we are used to things happening which compel us to do other things. How seldom can we live simply by means of the depth and richness we assume that there is within ourselves."