This History of Busyness

Short Story

And so, it happened many, many years ago.  There was some vague understanding of how new ideas really came about.  I didn't say they knew how to make them occur, but they did understand how they came to be.  They understood that creative new ideas just seemed to bubble up when you least expected them, when you were doing something totally disconnected from the idea, when you were wasting time or having fun or, at times, when you worked very hard at a problem and either gave up on it or simply quit from exhaustion.  In their benighted in­nocence, they simply accepted that as how things were.

In order to pass the time away while they were waiting for ideas, after the idea of the wheel and how to cultivate crops had come to them, they began to construct a series of more and more complex games to play.  They were already tired of canasta, hopscotch and even Monopoly and wanted a game without an ending.  Finally, they decided to simply spend the time talking about whatever came to mind, not making any distinctions between important and unimportant and treating them all as though they were equally important, or unimportant. 

They found this to be mildly amusing at first, and after a while it became very amusing and finally downright hilarious because of the strange com­bination of things that came to mind as interesting or important at the moment.  They spent hours talking and laughing and marveling at the sheer craziness of their minds.  But it truly kept them busy between ideas and the ideas did continue to occur.

They continued, and improved upon their new busyness game and eventually found that they could add another level to the enjoyment by writing their inane bits of information on little slips of paper (the beginning of the MEMO) that they passed back and forth when things got slow, and sometimes even read them at home in the evening to the enjoyment and delight of everyone.  And the ideas continued to come.

This was passed down from generation to generation, and, like many games and rituals, its real sources were lost with time and new explanations and "scientific" interpretations were given.  It was reasoned that the great ideas came from the process of talking and writing and, logically, must be connected to the ideas that were discussed.  So, if we could formalize those processes and take them seriously, we could maximize the energy of those involved and more efficiently produce great ideas, especially if everyone were involved in the process.

So, it was formalized.  It was renamed, Business, to fit its importance.  And since it held so much promise, it was taken very seriously.  In fact, anyone found to be laughing, or even smiling, was frowned upon and excluded from the inner circles.  The words and writing came faster and faster and there were new problems like storage of all of the information and integrating it.  For surely one of those papers would be very important.

Conferences were held to decide which of the ideas was important and to give the emphasis that an important idea should have.  But somehow, the results didn't seem to change anything, and no one really got excited about the ideas.  But no one dared to say that or to laugh for fear of not being taken seriously.

What was worse was that most of the clearly great ideas came without conferences and from other people who didn't get them in business.  Some of these people even laughed at business.  It was clear that these aberrations had to be nipped in the bud.  Many of them were, but they continue even today.  But they still have faith in the old time-tested ways, especially since they now seem to have been “scientifically” improved.

And as we stay busy with our busyness, the ideas continue to bubble up.  We often don't notice them because our attention is on the importance of our processes, the memos and the documentation, and the organization of all that paper. We focus on our seriousness and our business.  What started as a distraction to let the ideas bubble up on their own has become the focus of our attention with the real ideas becoming the distraction since they don't come in the fashion we can predict.  But the ideas keep bubbling in case we ever want to use them.  And so, ideas continue, often in spite of us.

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