The Cure For Busyness: Silence and Solitude
We are busy people living in a busy world. If you want to see this fact clearly, all you need to do is start asking people one question: “How are you?”
Have you noticed this? The common response is twofold: “I’m good, I’m busy.” “How are things going?” “They’re good, they’re busy.”
According to a study cited in the Harvard Business Review, when people were asked “How are you?”, 80% of responses included the word “busy.” A Gallup poll found that in 2018, 80% of Americans reported they “never had enough time.” Social scientists have started calling this rise in overcommitment “time poverty,” and honestly, most of us have become the lived embodiment of that popular gif of the cat frozen in front of the computer.
What’s perhaps most fascinating about this trend, though, is that many of us actually celebrate it. We equate busyness with goodness and health; we’ve turned busyness into a virtue. Research out of Columbia University shows that we tend to assume busy people are also more important and impressive. Studies from the American Psychological Association found that people rate busyness as a “morally admirable” trait. Busy people are better people—or so we’ve come to believe.
It’s not just that our schedules are full. Feeling and acting busy has become a point of pride in our culture. There’s a phrase that’s made the rounds the last few years: “Rise and grind.” It’s the title of a recent New York Times bestseller; search YouTube and you’ll find dozens of motivational speeches with millions of views under that title. For those less familiar with it, the phrase essentially expresses the notion that we need to become people who are busy from the moment we wake until the moment we go to bed, or else we aren’t maximizing our potential. We need to constantly fill our lives with activities and accomplishments and experiences in order to become people who are truly fulfilled and content. Busyness is something we wear like a badge of honor.
We’re so conditioned by this that most of us are terrified of not being busy. Any bit of emptiness, of silence, of space needs to be filled by something. Consider our smartphone usage: the average iPhone user touches their phone more than 2,600 times a day. We can’t handle not being busy. We are constantly looking for something to keep us occupied;our minds and our hearts shudder at stillness. Philosopher Baruch Spinoza called this a horror vacui, a fear of vacancy.
And when we live long enough in this kind of culture, shaped by the busyness of the world around us, it starts to take a devastating toll on our health.
Hurry Sickness
Back in the 1950s, a cardiologist named Meyer Friedman saw our busy world coming. He was one of the first doctors to illustrate how high stress levels were connected to heart disease. He said that most of us in America live with what he called “hurry sickness,” a “continuous struggle and unremitting attempt to accomplish and/or achieve more and more things or participate in more and more events in less and less time.”
Is that not a description of so many of our lives today?
Contemporary doctors have adopted Friedman’s language; “hurry sickness” is something psychiatrists actually use to describe patients. Doctors Rosemary Sword and Philip Zimbardo wrote an article titled “Hurry Sickness: Is the Quest to Do All and Be All Costing Us Our Health?” In it, they offer three questions to help identify whether we suffer from it ourselves:
When you’re checking out at the grocery store, do you tend to look for the shortest line?
When you’re pulling up to a red light, do you count the cars ahead of you in each lane so you can join the shortest one?
Do you often multitask to the point where you forget one of the tasks you were working on?
Based on those criteria, I’d guess the vast majority of us suffer from hurry sickness.
And this condition isn’t just affecting our bodies and minds. It’s devastating to our souls.
What Busyness Costs Us
When we live lives of busyness without margin, lives overstuffed with noise and activity and constant “doing,” we lose the capacity to become present, in a variety of ways.
We lose the capacity to become present to the moment. Whatever situation is in front of us, good or bad or ugly, busyness robs us of the ability to truly enter into it, because we are distracted or numb or always looking for something better or more. Douglas Steere called this “interior immigration”: we’re here in body, but our minds and hearts are a thousand miles away, missing what is actually here for us in the present moment.
We lose the capacity to become present to others. Deep human connection gets lost in the blur of busyness. We overlook the barista, the coworker, the neighbor, the person in need, because we’re consumed with our own need to get things done, to be efficient, to maximize our lives.
We lose the capacity to become present to our own souls. So often we use busyness as a tool to repress our fears or anxieties. It makes us into “outward” people obsessed with how we appear or what we accomplish, and we fail to become “inward” people who genuinely reflect on the meaning of our lives or on who we truly are. James Houston put it well in The Transforming Friendship:
Busyness seems to be a determination not to “miss out on life.” Behind much of the rat race of modern life is the unexamined assumption that what I do determines who I am. In this way, we define ourselves by what we do, rather than by any quality of what we are inside. It is typical in a party for one stranger to approach another with the question, “What do you do?” Perhaps we wouldn’t have a clue how to respond to the deeper question, “Who are you?”
We lose the capacity to become present to God. Our lives become simply too full to allow room for any meaningful engagement with him. So many of us would love to pray, to read Scripture, to spend time with God—we just don’t have time for it. Our hands are grasped so tightly onto our busyness that they can’t open to receive the presence, peace, love, and grace God longs to give us. Thomas Kelly captured this ache in A Testament of Devotion:
Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasiness, because we have hints that there is a way of life vastly richer and deeper than all this hurried existence, a life of unhurried serenity and peace and power. If only we could slip over into that Center! If only we could find the Silence which is the source of sound!
Our culture of busyness is leading us rapidly into physical, emotional, and spiritual oblivion. It’s why the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Christian teachers who formed alternative communities away from the hurry of their own culture, referred to busyness as “moral and spiritual laziness.” So often it’s an excuse to avoid, escape, or ignore the depth of the life available to us with God.
We need the cure for this disease. We need the cure for busyness.
That’s exactly why this piece kicks off a short essay series I’m calling The Cure for Busyness, a look at how Jesus and Scripture both name our human propensity toward busyness and prescribe practices in a life with God that serve as the cure. Today, I want to focus on one particular habit that Jesus not only taught but embraced himself, one that has served as a cure for busyness in his own life and in the lives of his followers for centuries, producing people who are radically present to God, to themselves, and to others. It’s the practice of silence and solitude.
Luke 5:12-16 is the passage I’ll spend some time with today to explore this practice and how it can powerfully reshape our overbusy lives:
12 Once when he [Jesus] was in one of the cities, a man covered with a skin disease was there. When he saw Jesus, he bowed with his face to the ground and begged him, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” 13 Then Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I am willing. Be made clean.” Immediately the skin disease left him. 14 And he ordered him to tell no one. “But go, show yourself to the priest, and, as Moses commanded, make an offering for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.” 15 But now more than ever the word about Jesus spread abroad; many crowds were gathering to hear him and to be cured of their diseases. 16 Meanwhile, he would slip away to deserted places and pray.
Becoming Interruptible
We arrive at this passage in Luke in the thick of Jesus’s early teaching and healing. He’s been traveling around the ancient world, proclaiming that the redemption and restoration of all things God had always promised was now here in him, and his healings were evidence of it. He drives demons out of people believed to be beyond healing. He brings down dangerously high fevers and cures illnesses. He even performs a workplace miracle with some fishermen named Peter, James, and John, helping them catch fish on a day they hadn’t caught anything, and they take him up on his invitation to become his disciples.
Naturally, in the middle of all this, word about Jesus is spreading. A man with leprosy hears about him and comes to Jesus, interrupting his journey through the city.
Now, when this happens, its important to remember: Jesus has places to go, people to see. He’s in the middle of the project of redeeming and restoring all things. Yet he remains remarkably interruptible in the midst of that mission. That’s one of the things you’ll notice about Jesus throughout his life if you read carefully: he was certainly focused on a mission, but he was always paying attention, always attuned to the needs of those around him. He was never so busy that he couldn’t be interrupted, especially if it meant loving and caring for his neighbor. We can often tell what kind of people we’re becoming based on how we respond when we’re interrupted; that’s a good gauge for whether we’ve become captive to the oppression of busyness in our own lives.
Remember, too, who this leper was. Lepers in that day had to quarantine from everyone else; their illness made them a contagious threat to the cleanliness of the community, overlooked and isolated and often shamed. Yet Jesus has time for him. Not only is Jesus interruptible, he’s willing to be interrupted by the people his culture deemed most insignificant and broken. Jesus always has time for even the most broken of us.
In this interruption, Jesus dignifies the man. He sees him. He speaks with him. He looks him in the eyes. He touches him. And he heals him.
Then he tells the man: don’t go back and advertise this loudly to everyone. Simply go show yourself to the priest so he can declare you clean and able to re-enter public life. That’s how it worked back then: when someone recovered from illness, they needed the priest’s confirmation. Jesus is essentially saying, “Now that you’re healed, get back into the life of loving God and loving your neighbor.”
But the healing doesn’t exactly miss the headlines. Luke tells us that word about Jesus spread abroad even more, and crowds gathered to hear him and be healed of their diseases. People from all over the ancient world were flocking to see him, obsessed with what he’s been doing, pressing in on him to do more.
But notice what Jesus does when the crowds press in. He leaves. Luke says he “often withdrew to deserted places and prayed.”
As soon as his work is getting really successful, as soon as business is booming, as soon as his ministry is expanding, he leaves.
This is exactly the opposite of how our busyness-culture has trained us to respond to the crowds. Most of us actually assume crowds are the goal, that busyness and noise and demand validate our work, and that more hurry means more success. Imagine if we modern-day Americans were in charge of Jesus’s ministry at this moment. The obvious next move would be to double down on the crowds. Work harder, longer hours, keep the production churning. This is amazing! Let’s build a mega healing center right here, set up a drive-thru healing line, get a merch stand going for t-shirts and mugs. Let’s get busy! Let’s up our hours and keep working harder! All for the Kingdom!
I can hear my own “doing”-obsessed, busyness-conditioned voice calling Jesus out as he walks away from the crowds: Jesus, look at all these people who need help! Look at all the good work you could be doing!
Yet Jesus will have none of it. There are no Messiah mugs for sale, no mega-ministry to set up. He refuses to become consumed by the busyness of “doing” that so many of us are consumed by, because Jesus knows what we so often forget: he can only unify people to the love and grace and peace of God if he himself is unified with the love and grace and peace of God. True and deep human life and work are prompted by connection to God, not the urgency of the busy crowds.
In a world constantly pressing in on us with incessant busyness, Jesus reminds us that the most radical thing we can do is stop doing. The most radical thing we can do is become reoriented toward God.
This flies in the face of rise-and-grind culture. For most of us, the pathway to a successful, fulfilled life is the pathway of more: more hours, more activities for the kids, more weekend commitments, more hobbies. Walking away from busyness sounds nice in theory, but it seems to come at the expense of success or efficiency. To be successful, you’ve got to be busy. Successful people don’t turn down crowds of good work like this.
But remember who we’re reading about: the single most influential figure in history, someone who did everything he was called to do, who was remarkably successful in his life—and yet he was never hurried. He was never consumed by busyness. The life of Jesus is a giant challenge to all of us in our lives of busyness: success is not equivalent to hurry. What Jesus shows us is that a successful and healthy life of “doing” is always borne out of a healthy “being.” As Martin Luther is said to have put it:
“I am so busy now that if I did not spend three hours each day in prayer, I could not get through the day.”
What the world most needs isn’t more fifty-hour-work-week people, or more anxiously driven people, or more constantly productive people. It needs more deep people, more loving people, more gracious people, and we can only become those sorts of people when we prioritize time with the source of those things, when we cease our work and open up our minds, bodies, and souls before God, allowing him to shape us as we move into our doing.
This is why Jesus and his followers, for millennia, have emphasized this practice, often called silence and solitude: the deliberate choice to stop doing and create space to be known by God, listen to God, and be formed by God. Silence and solitude is an essential medication in the cure for busyness.
Let’s look at three things about this practice: what it is (and isn’t), what it does, and how we practice it.
What Silence and Solitude Is (And Isn’t)
Often, not occasional. Notice that the text says Jesus did this “often” when things got busy. This wasn’t a one-off retreat every couple of years, it was a consistent habit built into his regular rhythms. In Luke’s Gospel alone we read about Jesus doing this nine times. In fact, the more high-profile and in-demand Jesus became, the more he pressed into this practice of being with God in private, away from the crowds and demands.
Most of us, if we’re honest, go the opposite direction. The busier life gets, the more responsibilities we carry, the less time we spend with God. The greater the demands of kids or school or family or work, the less we actually choose to set aside time to be with him; we use busyness as an excuse to spend less time with God. So is it any wonder we feel burdened by our workloads and feel God is far from us in our busy lives? Is it any wonder we’re filled with irritability and restlessness and numbness? We lament that our lives are overstuffed, but we also resist the very practice that might help us navigate them well.
So often we speak of the difficulty of feeling like God is absent in the middle of our busy lives, and that’s always a worthwhile experience to explore. But we might also need to be more honest with ourselves: how often are we the ones absent to God? How often are we the ones who neglect cultivating space for him to work in our lives? How often are we the ones who neglect the very means by which God speaks to our souls, in the stillness, in the quiet, in solitude?
Solitude and silence should happen often, not occasionally, and we should especially retain them when we get busier. It’s the only way we’ll navigate the tyranny of busyness well.
Withdrawal in prayer, not escapism. Luke describes the practice itself: Jesus “withdrew,” moving away from the demands and busyness of the world around him, in prayer. This wasn’t just a day off; it wasn’t a time to veg out watching the same sitcom for the two-hundredth time or mindlessly binge a video game for hours. We often assume that kind of zoning out will cure our busyness. What we actually find is that it doesn’t resolve the anxiety or tension we feel: it just buries it, and it comes right back up when we’re done. We get stuck in this endless cycle of busyness, then veging out, then busyness again.
What we need isn’t escapism. What we need is withdrawal into prayer, and not just prayer as a wish list of things we want God to do for us, but prayer as abiding with God, resting in him, allowing his presence and character and life to pervade our hearts and minds. Theologian Ronald Rolheiser described this kind of prayer as “relaxing into God’s goodness.” That’s what we need: space and time to bring all our messiness and busyness and relax into the goodness of God. As Theophan the Recluse wrote:
“To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all seeing, within you.”
Deserted, not public. Finally, notice that Luke says this solitude had a particular location: “deserted places.” The word can mean wilderness, or desert, or a quiet place; the point is that it’s a place free from the stimuli of the busy world, a place where we can’t be easily interrupted by the demands and distractions around us, where we can find deep stillness in the presence of God.
For me, this means a particular chair in my study in the mornings, positioned where natural light pours through the windows and screens are absent. It means a devoted prayer garden here in Phoenix that I can visit once a month. It means a natural vista a couple of hours out of town, where I lose phone reception and encounter God in his creation. Those are just ideas: find a deserted place that works for you, away from the noise of busyness, a place of external stillness and quiet.
So this practice: it’s often, not occasional; it’s withdrawal, not escapist; it’s deserted, not public. And when we start to embrace these habits, they begin to transform us in a few ways.
What Silence and Solitude Does
It fights evil. I know that language sounds intense, but it’s true. Most of us don’t think of solitude that way: we think of a pleasant afternoon at a favorite coffee shop with a latte and a book. But throughout Christian history, people who have practiced this most emphatically will tell you: they’re fighting down evil when they do. Jesus went to the desert to do battle with the devil himself.
The busyness of our lives often makes us overlook brokenness and messiness latent in us and in the world. We need to remove ourselves from the hurry to see ourselves, God, and the world more clearly. Henri Nouwen wrote about this powerfully:
We think of solitude as a station where we can recharge our batteries, or as a corner of the boxing ring where our wounds are oiled, our muscles massaged, and our courage restored by fitting slogans. But that is not the solitude of John the Baptist, of Anthony or Benedict. For them solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born... Solitude is the furnace of transformation.
What Nouwen is getting at is that intentionally removing ourselves from the chaos and noise of the world opens us up to a different, inner chaos in ourselves. It opens us up to the brokenness and messiness that exists in us. This is often why so many of us go to great lengths to avoid solitude: because the truth comes out, and the truth isn’t always pretty. It’s always easier not to deal with our stuff. Our busyness is often a smokescreen preventing us from dealing with our brokenness. What solitude allows us to do is unearth that brokenness before God so it might be healed and restored.
I experience this all the time. When I enter into the deserted place, my mind and heart just start going. I think about my to-do list, the person who annoyed me yesterday, the movie I can’t wait to see. And then, once all that busyness passes, my other stuff bubbles to the surface: jealousy, fear, worry, anxiety, pride, my anxious grabbing for control, my mixed motives. All the things under the surface of my life come up.
That’s actually the point. All that chaos was already swirling in me, a mess of busyness, and if I didn’t go to solitude to unearth it before God, it would have inevitably poured out of me in unhealthy and toxic ways. But because I’ve brought it into solitude and silence, God can start to bring healing and life through it. Solitude is what allows me to wade into my own mess: to confess and receive forgiveness, to release my illusion of control into God’s hands, to rest in his presence, to receive his healing love in my deepest insecurities. When we enter into solitude, we’re at war: war with the distractions that prevent us from knowing who we really are, war with the unhealth that flows out of us in our busy lives, war with the insecurity and hopelessness that keep us from seeing God’s redemption at work. Solitude is the battlefield where we fight with God against these evils within us.
It provides space for God’s love. If we stay in solitude and silence long enough, we find that we’re not really alone when we’re alone. As we empty the messiness and brokenness in us before God, we’re met by his compassionate presence, saying to us: My beloved, I am with you. I’ve always been with you. And I love you. I forgive you. I am for you. Now rest with me. That is the God we’ve missed in all the frantic busyness of our lives, the God our souls desperately need to experience.
One of the primary reasons we fail to deeply experience the love of God in our busy lives is because we don’t set aside adequate times of silence. We fail to remember what John of the Cross found: “Silence is God’s first language.” You can listen to a thousand sermons and read a thousand books about God’s love, and those are worthwhile things. But what your soul deeply needs is an experience, not just head knowledge, of the love of God in Christ. And that love isn’t coercive or forceful. It’s constantly speaking to us, but to hear it, we have to create space by removing the outer noise that drowns it out. Our ears are too stuffed up with junk and nois; solitude is what clears out the ears of our heart.
It sends us back to the world in our calling. The endgame of solitude and silence isn’t just to get away from it all; it isn’t spiritual escapism where we detach from the world entirely. The endgame is to bring us back into the world as vehicles of love and joy and peace, in unity with God and our neighbor. We withdraw from the world in solitude to return to the world in love.
That’s the whole point of the Christian story: the redemption and restoration of all things in Jesus, not the discarding of all things. The purpose of solitude is to get us more deeply connected to God’s love, grace, and presence so we can live out our calling in partnership with him, bringing love and grace to the world. That’s why, every time you see solitude practiced in Scripture, the story ends with a powerful re-entry into the world in the calling of God’s love. Elijah came out of his desert solitude in 1 Kings with real clarity on where he needed to go to raise up leaders who knew God’s heart. Paul came out of his desert solitude in Arabia with real clarity on the Gospel message and his own role in proclaiming it to the Gentiles, the outsiders, the others. Jesus himself came out of his desert solitude in Mark 1 knowing exactly the next steps on his journey as he proclaimed the Kingdom of God to the world.
Solitude and silence always send us back into the world as people who have experienced God’s love and are taking a next step to embody that love to others. We often emerge from solitude with a real inkling from God about who we need to be and where we need to be heading, reminded of particular people we’re called to love, a job we might need to commit to, a neighbor we need to check in on. It drives us right back into the world with love.
This is what solitude and silence do: they fight evil, they provide space to experience God’s love, and they get us back into the world.
How We Practice Silence and Solitude
So how do we build this practice into our already overbusy lives? How do we avoid making it just another religious to-do heaped onto an already busy schedule?
Start where you are, not where you think you should be. If you’re anything like me, your first instinct is to want to do all the things right now: a two-week fast, a silent retreat into the mountains. But for most of us, that isn’t really possible. We aren’t monks or nuns. That doesn’t mean we can’t start somewhere.
Start by building in fifteen minutes in the morning. Ditch your phone alarm. More than 95% of millennials and Gen Zers sleep with their phone by their bed; ditching that rhythm can be one of the most radical choices you make this week. Get an old-school alarm clock (they’re about ten dollars), leave your phone outside your bedroom, and set the alarm. When you wake up, do what you need to wake up a bit—drink some water, brush your teeth, get your coffee—but then, before jumping to your phone or your to-do list, set aside fifteen minutes to simply pray in a particular spot in your home. Take a few deep breaths. Pray a prayer of gratitude. Read Psalm 23 once or twice. Contemplate the love of God for you. The more you do this, the more you’ll encounter God in your midst, and the more you’ll want to keep praying, keep expanding the practice. If you’re looking for guides or help on structuring this prayer practice, check out the Resource Library I’ve created here.
Remember your season of life. If you have young kids, solitude is still possible, but it’ll look different than it does for someone who’s single, or retired, or has older kids. Your season of life isn’t a disqualifier, it’s simply about pursuing solitude in a way that makes sense for where you are right now. That might mean nap time, and that’s okay. The point is to pursue God wherever you are.
Be patient with yourself. All of us enter into solitude carrying our own distractions and baggage. Have patience with yourself. Distractions aren’t condemning: they’re opportunities to experience God in a new way.
Remember you’re not earning anything. Solitude and silence aren’t about religious activity to earn favor or esteem before God. He has already named each one of us his beloved daughter or son, and there’s nothing we can do to earn or unearn that love. We’re simply posturing ourselves to receive and abide in that love, and extending it to the world. We never enter solitude trying to earn God’s love, only ever in response to it.
Become A Friend of Silence
“The friend of silence draws near to God.” - John Climacus, 7th-century theologian
Let’s become friends of the silence. Let’s become people who withdraw often to deserted places to pray. Because it’s there we can fight down evil. It’s there we’ll find the love we’re looking for. It’s there we can be sent back into our doing as transformed people. It’s there we’ll find the cure to our busyness.