A Quote by Sebastian Faulks
Busy is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or "goals." Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived ... Suppose, though, you're not sure that what you're doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It's easy, it pays quite well. But really it's a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing.
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Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.
"What are you doing?" you ask.
"Can't you see?" comes the impatient reply. "I'm sawing down this tree."
"You look exhausted!" you exclaim. "How long have you been at it?"
"Over five hours," he returns, "and I'm beat! This is hard work."
'Well, why don't you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?" you inquire. "I'm sure it would go a lot faster."
"I don't have time to sharpen the saw," the man says emphatically. "I'm too busy sawing!"
We know how hard it is to travel around and if the schedules are really tight for you, it means you're doing really well because you're not going home early from many events. When you go deep in tournaments, that's the consequence you have to pay I suppose.
I seemed busy, busy, busy, but I suppose, if pressed, I might have admitted that, for all my frenzy, I was very much alone.
When you're in your 30s and actively pursuing a career and a home life, a wife and children, you're busy doing as opposed to busy thinking. As you get older, even as you don't have as much time, I think you tend to think more and reflect more on what is happening in your own life.
My last couple of films, 'ABCD 2' and 'Rock On 2,' didn't do as well as expected. It affected me quite a bit, but then easier said than done, I had to stop thinking about it and continue doing what I love doing best!
It's lame when I'm hanging out with my friends and they're so busy taking pictures to put on Facebook, instead of enjoying what they're doing. You're gonna look back and have 10 million pictures, but you're not in one of them because you were too busy clicking away. I think it's best to stop telling people about it and enjoy the moment you're in yourself.
The endless, useless urge to look on life comprehensively, to take a bird's-eye view of ourselves and judge the dimensions of what we have or have not done: this is life as landscape, or life as résumé. But life is incremental, and though a worthwhile life is a gathering together of all that one is, good and bad, successful and not, the paradox is that we can never really see this one thing that all of our increments (and decrements, I suppose) add up to.
We're busy being busy. Distraction is a dangerously deceptive saboteur of our goals, because we are not present to how much time we lose. We're distracted by things like being in meetings or on conference calls, or we get on Facebook related to business and the updates of friends captivate our attention and an hour goes by before we wake up.
I often wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn't made that decision. I suppose I would have sunk. I suppose I would have found some kind of hole and tried to hide or pass. After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities. I would have hidden in my hole and been crippled by my sentimentality, doing what I was doing, and doing it well, but always looking for the wailing wall. And I would never have seen the world as the rich place that it is. You wouldn't have seen me here in Africa, doing what I do.
Since the release of my single 'Born To Try' I have been so busy completing the album as well as my busy Neighbours schedule I have not had much spare time. When I do get the chance I just love to hang around at home with friends and family.
I often wonder: suppose we could begin life over again, knowing what we were doing? Suppose we could use one life, already ended, as a sort of rough draft for another? I think that every one of us would try, more than anything else, not to repeat himself, at the very least he would rearrange his manner of life, he would make sure of rooms like these, with flowers and light ... I have a wife and two daughters, my wife's health is delicate and so on and so on, and if I had to begin life all over again I would not marry. ... No, no!
I suppose my interest in looking for life elsewhere in the universe really dates back to my teens. What teenager doesn't look up at the sky at night and think am I alone in the universe? Well most people get over it, but I never did and though I made a career more in physics and cosmology than astrobiology I've always had a soft spot for the subject of life because it does seem so mysterious.
Well, we spend an awful lot of our time working and doing experiments. It's very busy up on the shuttle.
Don't mistake movement for achievement. It's easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is: Busy doing what?
I suppose what you're doing as a painter is making a record of your trip through life. I can't think of any job that is quite as satisfactory as doing a painting.
I suppose I just had this Christian idea about how I ought to go about my life. I thought, 'If I work really hard and have a bit of success, the problems I'd had all my life would leave me.' But, of course, not a bit of it left me because Asperger's is not something you just get over or grow out of.
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