Being is More Important Than Doing

Sometimes simple words are best.

I recently read a reflection on a deep truth—being is more important than doing. 

It’s a familiar concept, but as I’d just come off a busy season of travel and writing deadlines, the reminder hit home. I felt my breath deepen and my shoulders relax. Yes. Doing is good. Being is better.

Here are those simple words from the pen of the late author and Harvard professor Henri Nouwen:

I suspect that we too often have lost contact with the source of our own existence and have become strangers in our own house. We tend to run around trying to solve the problems of our world while anxiously avoiding confrontation with that reality wherein our problems find their deepest roots: our own selves. In many ways we are like the busy executive who walks up to a precious flower and says: “What for God’s sake are you doing here? Can’t you get busy somehow?” and then finds the flower’s response incomprehensible: “I am sorry, but I am just here to be beautiful.

How can we also come to this wisdom of the flower that being is more important than doing? How can we come to a creative contact with the grounding of our own life?

henri nouwen

Take time to pause. Breath deep. Be still. Do nothing. Reconnect with the source of your identity, be that God, the universe, or whatever forms the core of your being. If you do, you’ll take another relaxed step toward Becoming Yourself.

This post was originally published Aug 13, 2022. Text excerpts taken from “You are the Beloved” by Henri J.M. Nouwen, © 2017 by The Henri Nouwen Legacy Trust. Published by Convergent Books.  Shared in the August 6, 2022 Daily Meditation from the Henri Nouwen Society.