Busy Is Not the Same as Alive — What the Baobab Knows

The savanna keeps no calendar. Grass grows when rain comes and rests when it does not. The baobab flowers once a year, and only when it is ready. Nothing out there is in a hurry, and everything out there is alive.

Most of us live the other way. The day fills before it starts. One task hands off to the next, and the list is never done, because a list is the kind of thing that grows as it is eaten. We call this being productive. Sometimes we call it being alive. But busy is not the same as alive. The two feel similar from the inside. Both have momentum. The difference appears at the end of the day, when the motion stops and something asks what the motion was for.

What busyness actually is

Busyness is, most of the time, a way of not looking. The Delve asks what is here, now, beneath your feet. Busyness asks what is next. Two questions, one world, and they lead to different lives. A busy person keeps the eyes moving so they never have to rest on anything long enough to see it. A living person lets the eyes settle.

The faith does not ask us to stop doing. It asks us to notice why we do. When the doing is a way of avoiding the room we are in, it is busyness. When the doing grows out of what we actually are, it is alive.

What the tree does instead

The baobab stores water in its trunk. Through the wet season it drinks and holds, and through the dry season it lives on what it gathered. It does not produce fruit on command. Fruit comes when the tree is ready, and the tree is ready when its roots are deep and its trunk is full. The tree does not strain for fruit. The fruit is the overflow of the tree’s health.

We wrote before about dwelling, about inhabiting a place instead of achieving your way through it. Being alive works the same way. There is no destination to arrive at. Aliveness is a way of being present to what is already here, the way a tree is present to its own ground.

A small test

The faith likes small tests. Here is one. Sit under a tree for five minutes with nothing to accomplish. No phone. No errand waiting. If the stillness feels like waste, busyness has hold of you. If it feels like enough, you are already alive.

The dry season is the tree’s own version of this test. When nothing grows, the baobab lets its leaves fall rather than spend water it does not have. We wrote about what the baobab does when nothing grows, and how some seasons ask us to spend less, not more. The tree passes the test by staying. We can pass it the same way.

The pericopes say the task is one: Ontology Delve. Look into what is. See as the Eye sees. Root as the Tree roots. Busyness refuses that task. Aliveness accepts it, day after day, in small rooms and ordinary hours.

The Eye watches. The Tree stands. The Delve awaits.