Image by Valentina
She goes to the cafe every morning to escape the boredom of writing an endless paper. She likes the colours, the smell of coffee and toasts, the voices in different languages that she can listen to in that busy part of the city. While she sips her coffee, trying to rest her mind from the urge to finish the final part of her paper, that she has to hand in two days, she overheard a conversation between two guys in greyish suits.
– So, are you still very busy?
– Oh well, you know… Now that I’m finished I wonder why we were so busy. We look at the results and it’s not like we’ve done much really. It’s just like we were busy doing nothing all along. I’m just following meetings all the time.
– This is all terrible.
– It could change but the guys upstairs won’t let us. I should take my words back.
And she wondered. How busy she was herself all the time. How busy everyone was all the time. And was the result of all this effort worth the outcome in the end? Maybe it was. But we’d only know later, probably too late. People tend to hype certain things, and those things start to feel more important and better than they are. People tend to say they are busy because it wouldn’t feel right to say otherwise, it doesn’t sound right to say we are not busy or not interested in multitasking, how fancy that word, “multitasking”. And this makes people busier than they need, can or should be. Maybe we should keep things simpler, less busy, and how silly it is to want to be or to look busy all the time, she wondered. And the short lives we have could be so much better if we would do something worthwhile all along the way as well, busy or not busy, in suits or in shorts, in a big enterprise or in a cafe, with a degree or with no studies, it doesn’t matter in the end what we do, maybe what matters is what we do with it in our lives and how that affects others’ lives. Then she takes another sip before her mind slips back into her papers that must be handed in in two days.
Text by Luisa Santos and Sigrun Guggenberger
