Busy Doing or Busy Being?
Coaching, literature & contemplative writings help me figure out the difference.
Last week my friend, Heather, and I saw Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in Jamie Lloyd’s Waiting for Godot at the Hudson Theater in New York. It was 100% amazing. It’s been decades since I read Beckett’s play, but I remember being amused by it enough to keep a paperback copy of it in my library which I’ve packed and moved a dozen times. I’m marveling how useful and relevant Waiting for Godot is for me today.
This past year I’ve been on a journey towards integration away from compartmentalization which has been my default for many, many years. My concept of integration is being able to move fluidly between and within thought and doing in my creativity, relationships, spirituality, physicality, daily routines, strategy, execution, etc.
I started the year with real desire to move away from saying, “I have to do this. I need time to do that. I have to be in a place or mindset to do x.” All that saying and thinking often led to either busy work (I’m soooo good at working around the edges of a thing), never getting the “this” or the “that” done in a way that felt aligned, and/or a hell of a lot of stress, incompleteness, and self-judgment. I was tired of feeling internally fractured.
My goal? To feel whole. Current status? I’m feeling whole. Realization? To continue to actualize this integration, it’s going to take both doing and being.
I have coaching, literature and contemplative writings to help me figure out the difference and how to leverage both. Coaching has helped me figure out my blocks, understand what wholeness means to me, and given me structure to work on this super important goal in alignment with my values and purpose, all with a coach who gets me. Contemplative writing like Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends with Yourself Through Meditation and Everyday Awareness by Chögyam Trungpa and literature like Hamlet and Waiting for Godot.
On my journey of intentional integration and creating to be ORNAT to be, rediscovering Beckett couldn’t have come at a better time. If Hamlet asks, “to be or not to be?” then in Waiting for Godot the question becomes “what are we doing?”
What I’m learning and relearning through coaching is that integration isn’t a finish line. It’s just real work: not choosing between doing or being, but realizing, noticing, and calibrating how they meet.
