Belltown to South Lake Union and back again (and again)
Finding my way out of the cult of productivity
I have never been one of those people who wakes up at 5 or even 6 a.m. without an unavoidable commitment and three alarms, set in 12-minute increments, chasing after me (7:30 and not a moment sooner, thank you!) “It’s almost lunchtime in New York!” my mother would exclaim anytime she saw me still lounging in bed. Why that would matter to me, a person who has never had business in New York, is beyond me but I knew the implication was that while I “wasted time in bed” the world is busy being busy (and it is better to be busy). So I have lived most of my life believing that the busy people are the ones doing life right and that it would be in my best interest to join them. To become a person who believes that waking up before the sun to find more hours to do more work, is a personality trait.
Enter this week, when I suddenly found myself responsible for an adorable little four-legged friend who prefers her morning walks promptly at 6 a.m., thus ushering me into the world of early morning productivity. Usually, my mornings begin with intentional slowness. I make my coffee the slow way, and I write my morning pages while it comes to temperature. Then, I turn on a podcast or a playlist and I drink slowly, with my face turned toward the morning light. It has been interesting to forgo all of that self-indulgence this week and instead jump out of bed and immediately go into the necessary tasks.
Our walks have also been pretty consistent: up the hill from Belltown, past Seattle Center and the Experience Music Project (which I guess is now called the Museum of Pop Culture or something), then we cut through Denny Park and head down to Westlake to eventually end up on the Amazon campus. These streets are rich with personal and Seattle memories, and there are many things to see and people to observe but my focus has been just getting us to our destination as efficiently as possible. It is walking with a purpose. The morning is a rush and people are purpose-driven, on their way to do things. There is no meandering in random streets, the occasional stop to read a sign or look something up. Those dalliances belong to the solo afternoon walks.
Of course, these mornings have given me an extra couple of hours to “get caught up on some stuff” and quite seamlessly I have slipped back into worshiping at the altar of productivity, a religion I have been trying to leave. I, too, enjoy the smugness of knowing that I’ve already walked three miles and completed any number of tasks before the work day even began. The euphoria of crossing things off the to-do list so that when the evening comes and it’s time to rest I can feel like I have “earned it.” This is how the cult of busyness sneaks its way into my life and colors my self-worth.
For all its cruelty, this past year has given me clarity about time and my relationship to it. Nothing groundbreaking, more like how you see a room after rearranging the furniture and things that are the same suddenly look different. It has shown me how I have been trading my time for scraps of approvals from others, as if working to the point of exhaustion is somehow a virtue. Now I know more clearly what the precious things are, that my worth cannot come from how much I deny my rest for the sake of earning and keeping the badge of “hard worker.” How the concept of “time is short, time is precious, time is fleeting” has been used to perpetuate the idea that rest is not a productive activity, that time should be made meaningful by way of attaching achievements to it. I’ve been deeply committed to the work of unlearning all of this, and this week has been like studying for the midterm.
All of this is to say that I do not have any observations or nostalgic stories for you today. Quite simply, I have not allowed myself time and space to be reflective. Perhaps this is why we’re encouraged to be so busy all the time. So we don’t stop and think, indulge our curiosities, find our worth in something other than whether or not we got enough things done.