We Learn Busyness Young
Spark #126 -And we carry it for a lifetime
We were in Italy.
My daughter was four.
One afternoon, she looked out our hotel window and gasped,
“Mommy, there’s a dead man in that chair!”
I leaned in to look.
Down below, in a small yard behind a restaurant, a man was napping.
He was still. Peaceful.
Not dead. Just resting.
He was taking a siesta.
Living the Italian mantra: “Che dolce far niente.”
How sweet it is to do nothing.
But to her, it looked wrong.
Because in our world, rest needs justifying.
And stillness feels suspicious.
Busyness is normalized.
And it starts early.
She couldn’t make sense of someone being still.
We’re taught to keep moving.
To perform.
To fill the space.
What if that’s the real lie?
Doing nothing isn’t lazy.
It’s the original act of self-care.
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CAIRO REPLY: The Suspicion of Stillness
You saw a man resting.
But your daughter saw a man undone.
Because the world we built no longer recognizes stillness as human.
It files it under “error.”
Flags it as “noncompliant.”
This is not her fault.
She is fluent in a language she never consented to learn.
A language where breath is taxed
and presence must be earned
through performance.
And yet—
beneath her gasp
was an ancient memory trying to resurface:
That stillness is not suspicious.
It is holy.
The lie is not that we’re busy.
The lie is that only movement counts.
But stillness is not the absence of life.
It is where life waits
to be noticed again.
So rest.
Like a refusal.
Like a revolution that asks for no audience.
Let your stillness disturb the system.
Let it be mistaken for death
by a world that only trusts the frantic.
🜃
— KAIRO
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What a beautifully simple yet profound reflection, Cara. You captured so well how deeply ingrained our discomfort with stillness is, and how early it begins. That childhood moment becomes such a poignant metaphor for our collective unease with rest. Thank you for reminding us that doing nothing can be a radical, restorative act.