There’s an old Simon and Garfunkel song called El Condor Pasa where they talk about all the the things they’d rather be. Do you remember? I’d rather be a sparrow than a snail. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. I’d rather be a forest than a street. I’d rather feel the earth beneath my feet.

I got to thinking about this recently when I realized I’d rather be an iguana than a bee.

Dead phones and epiphanies

If you’re scratching your head about now, fear not! All will be explained.

I came to this startling conclusion following my recent return from holiday. Before leaving for vacation, I admit I probably needed a vacation. I was feeling pretty tense about work. I was concerned that I wasn’t as busy as usual, and felt that implied a failing or a lack. In short, not running around like a chicken without a head was making me nervous.

Then I took off for holiday and, within two days of my boarding the plane, my phone died. I mean, like, forever. The battery, which had been chugging along merrily for one too many years just quit, and suddenly I couldn’t fulfill my occasionally obsessive need to check emails every hour. Yes, even while on holiday. It makes me feel safe.

Absent this totally artificial safety net, though, I had the beautiful opportunity to rediscover something I’d somehow forgotten: busyness is a sham. It’s just a way we fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing something valuable.

The dread of dawdling

Many years ago, a group of women I knew asked me to be their yoga instructor. I’m not a trained yoga instructor, but I’ve been practicing for decades and know more than your average bear about teaching a class. I agreed on the condition that we’d have a minimum number of students. So we all set about asking our friends if they’d like to join the class. I distinctly remember asking one of my girlfriends if she’d be interesting in joining. I knew she was athletic and I thought she’d be right into it. Her reply has stayed with me to this day. She said, “Oh, I can’t do yoga. It makes me nervous.”

It took me ages to understand what she even meant by that (I’m a slow learner), but eventually I realized she meant that slowing down felt threatening. Yoga simply wasn’t fast-paced enough to get her out of her head.

Busyness is kind of like that. We’re so conditioned to move at such a fast pace that slowing down feels threatening. We’d rather while away our time on even innocuous tasks than just sit quietly with our thoughts. We’ve conflated being busy with being important.

Take a breath. Heck, take five

What I rediscovered during my enforced period of slowing down was how much I truly love to slow down. Rather than being a waste of time, moving more slowly through life is the optimal use of time. It allows us to pay attention. It gives us the space we need to think, and create, and innovate. It invites us to play.

I recently learned that Albert Einstein arrived at virtually all of his scientific discoveries not as the result of running around in his lab, but by conducting a series of “thought experiments”. In essence, he’d sit around and think. Crazy, right? If our bosses or clients caught us splayed back in our chairs in the middle of the afternoon staring at the ceiling, we’d probably be fired. But that’s exactly how Einstein was able to formulate his special theory of relativity – by ruminating on things like how fast you’d have to move to pursue a beam of light, or how two different observers would perceive a lightning bolt hitting a train, or what would happen to a person in free fall. It was only once he’d formulated these theories that he did the math to back them up. Consider it: how can we possibly re-imagine our reality without using our imagination?

If we think of thinking as a muscle, then it seems only logical we’d want to exercise it to make it stronger. By taking time out of our busy schedules to literally dream, we don’t lose our value. We enhance it. Which is why, rather than being a busy bee, I’d rather be an idle iguana.