My friend Chris recently sent me a 2002 New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik called Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli about his daughter Olivia’s imaginary friend. The funny thing about Charlie Ravioli isn’t that he’s imaginary, but that he’s such a busy imaginary friend—too busy, most days, to play with the girl who imagines him, always jumping into a cab or letting his answering machine pick up when Olivia calls. Eventually, he’s so busy he must have his imaginary assistant Laurie tell Olivia that he’s too busy to play. As Gopnik writes, “Things seemed to be deteriorating; now Ravioli was too busy to say he was too busy.”
Olivia’s relationship with her overly busy imaginary friend leads Gopnik to think about busyness itself, about life in New York City, about busyness as an invention of modernity. Benjamin Franklin, Gopnik notes, “never complains about being busy, and always has time to publish a newspaper or come up with a maxim or swim the ocean or invent the lightning rod.” Henry James, on the other hand, living 100 years later, “with nothing particular to do save live, complains of being too busy all the time.” Which leads us to the present day: “Busyness is our art form, our civic ritual, our way of being us.”
Busyness is our way of being us.
Because being busy makes us feel alive, doesn’t it? Makes us feel important, competent, a part of something bigger than ourselves. And when everyone else speaks constantly about how busy she is, to not do the same feels like laziness. Even if we’re not actually busy, we must act as though we are. And more tragically, perhaps: we must believe in constant busyness. The importance of being busy isn’t just a lie we tell others; we must believe it for ourselves. We must believe that if we aren’t busy, we are nothing.
Which brings me to a confession: I have become Charlie Ravioli, believing myself too busy to have lunch with friends, rushing in and out of an endless succession of meetings I pretend are important. “I can’t believe I have 12 hours of meetings this week!” I complain to Zac, as if sitting in a meeting is harder work than coal mining or garbage collecting or flipping burgers in grease-filled kitchens. When talking with colleagues who say they’re overwhelmed, drowning in work, I agree reflexively because I know that’s what I’m supposed to do. If I don’t have more work than I can accomplish in one lifetime, I am clearly not working hard enough. I’ve begun to schedule phone calls weeks in advance with some of my dearest friends because heaven forbid I interrupt a work day to talk about a new baby or a book’s publishing. I call my mother while doing other errands—“Are you washing dishes again?” she has started to ask; “You only call me when you’re at the airport.” Worse yet, I have started to think of calling my mother as just another errand contributing to my busyness.
But I’m beginning to realize that I keep myself busy, repeat to myself how busy I am, to prove what I do is valuable—to myself, to my colleagues, to my friends. Worse yet, I believe in the lie of busyness: being busy means I’m doing something that matters, and doing something that matters means I matter. I can’t be a fraud or unimportant or just another cog in the wheel—look how busy I am! Look how much depends on me!
Gopnik describes Olivia’s invention of Charlie Ravioli as an insistence “that she does have days, because she is too harried to share them, that she does have an independent social life, by virtue of being too busy to have one.” We invent busyness to prove to others (and ourselves) that we are important because we are too busy to share our days with them. What a terrible construction.
And Gopnik wrote his essay eleven years ago. Imagine how much more busy Charlie Ravioli must be now.
Unless, of course, he realized he was creating his own busyness much of the time and chose to step away from it, from the lies he was telling himself about being busy. Maybe he realized his importance has less to do with the art of being busy, and more to do with how he chooses to spend his days.
Maybe he realized that busyness is a trap: it doesn’t demonstrate work success or intelligence or a life well lived. It just demonstrates an aptitude for busyness.
I’m not sure exactly what all this means for my own life, how to work hard without the constant pulse of busyness, how to nurture everything I want to nurture while remaining fully present in the world. How do I embrace sitting on the back porch drinking coffee with no agenda other than sitting on the back porch drinking coffee—and still accomplish everything I want to accomplish? How do I make time for swimming and writing maxims and inventing the lightning rod—without falling back into the busyness trap?
I’m not sure yet. But I’m sure I’m ready to break up with Charlie Ravioli. For one thing, he was no fun at all.
Planet of the Blind 