It’s taken me three months to schedule a haircut and it’s not because Ulta is so booked that I couldn’t get an appointment. It’s because I am so booked that I have scheduled and canceled at least three appointments. “This is just a busy season,” I tell myself looking ahead and trying to find a day off, a day of rest, knowing that I would be lucky to squeeze in a half-day of sabbath.
This is a busy season of life with young kids as a young professional, but am I really so busy that I can’t take an hour to get my hair cut? No, I’m not. When I truly reflect on the last three months of scheduling and canceling a haircut I realize that I, like so many, fall prey to the cultural expectations to go, go, go from one thing to another. I need to be needed. Moving from work to carpool to errands to home without really being in any of those places because my mind is constantly asking, “What’s next?”
And I feel guilty taking time to do simple things like get a haircut. Habits and patterns form more quickly than we care to admit. When we constantly go from one thing to another, we leave out rest. There’s no time to recover because there is no time in between exercises. We schedule our days, our weeks, and our months so full that we aren’t able to even remember what we even did last weekend. And when we live this way, we teach our children the same thing. We teach our children that in order to be successful and productive you have to be exhausted, tired, and most importantly busy.
In a recent study, it was reported that more than half of Americans don’t use their vacation days, which adds up to 658 million days of unused vacation, the highest ever reported. We are fighting against a cultural expectation when we take time to rest and time to reflect. We are fighting against false ideas of productivity and what it means to be successful when we stop and are present in the moment. We are fighting to teach our children and ourselves that being on busy and on the go isn’t the ultimate goal.
But we can’t teach that until we ourselves not only understand it but put it into practice.